Calligram Studio’s Phoenix Springs is a point-and-click adventure game with a slight mechanical twist. Rather than have you scrounge your way through an inventory filled with physical clues and tools, the game presents you with something more like a mental map filled with various ideas. These ideas can represent people, places, or sometimes just concepts that you can connect to objects or people in the world—or just bring them up in conversation—in order to solve the mystery of what happened to your brother, Leo Dormer.
The story of the game starts out as a relatively simple noir-inspired mystery. Playing as reporter Iris Dormer, you’ll track down leads and interview subjects as you hop from your apartment to Leo’s former residence to an abandoned university. The game’s world is tantalizingly mysterious—certainly sci-fi, most likely governed by an authoritarian state—and it’s filled with a wide array of strange and alluring characters. As things progress, especially once you reach the titular oasis, events become more and more unpredictable, taking on a logic that’s almost dreamlike.
Your lines of questioning yield increasingly mixed results, with characters who seem ever more detached from reality answering in quasi-philosophical musings. By its conclusion, Phoenix Springs is perhaps best understood less as a traditional narrative and more as a sequence of loosely connected, if often emotionally powerful, scenes: a suspicious writer scrawls an ominous new alphabet; a man hunches over and feels his steady pulse with concern; a musician uses repurposed medical equipment to perform a ballad that unlocks a memory.
The otherworldly nature of the game’s story is heightened further by its striking visuals. The strictly limited color palette of mustard, crimson, pale blue, and sage work in concert with minimal lines and deep, dark shadows to create an incredibly distinct and unified look. Animations, many of which are hand illustrated, are choppy and idiosyncratic, sometimes even leaning into the grotesque. Backgrounds flicker gently, suggesting the movement of a living world in an almost mechanical way. It’s all tied together with a litany of dramatic and artful fixed perspectives. Often these show Iris from afar—perhaps from a building’s rafters or through a windowpane—with foreground clutter obscuring your view.
Sound and music are also integral parts of the atmosphere here, as is made clear by the hauntingly dissonant vocal harmonies that greet you on the title screen. The crunching, martial, apocalyptic electronic music that echoes through the halls of the abandoned University of Life Sciences is a particular standout moment, although most of the audio work is more about ambient noise than discernible tracks like that. In general, it leans toward the claustrophobic, unnatural, and even mechanical. It also shifts as you make connections or discover new leads, often building slowly and ominously toward the game’s most dramatic moments.
Despite the spectacular presentation and thought-provoking story, though, there’s a nagging sense that Phoenix Springs is just a bit too vague. The game is drenched in interesting themes—the horror of immortality, the fragility of memory, the clashing of nature and technology—and yet it never seems willing to pin any of these ideas down with specifics.
Take a scene that plays out in the auditorium of the university. Some local teens have gathered there for a kind of rave where they use loud music and wild dancing to try to avoid sleeping for as long as possible. In a sense, it’s just an echo of what happened here before, right? After all, the scientific pursuit of life extending technology is ultimately as doomed as this particular exploration of the limits of human sleep deprivation. But why is the game highlighting this similarity in such a provocative way? Does it want us to think that science is somehow futile? Or maybe it’s just there to emphasize the mystical nature of medicine? Either way, there are no easy answers, just more beautiful scenes pervaded by an ambient sense of existential dread.
This game was reviewed with a key provided by Plan of Attack.
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