PC Draugen [Action / Adventure / Detective-mystery]

[Belazor et Britannia]

Recently came across a promo on GOG's twitter for a new indie title called "Draugen: https://www.gog.com/game/draugen

Launch trailer:

From GOG's page:
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Draugen is a single-player, first-person Fjord Noir tale of suspense and mystery, set in 1920s Norway.

About Draugen
From the studio that brought you Dreamfall Chapters, and the creative team behind The Longest Journey and The Secret World, comes a first-person psychological mystery set in 1920s Norway.

The year is 1923. You play Edward Charles Harden, an American traveller who's come to Norway to find his missing sister. But you're not alone: at every step of the way, Edward's accompanied by his ward, Lissie; a gregarious, independent and enigmatic young woman. Together, you must explore this scenic coastal community — nestled amongst the fjords and mountains of rural Norway — in your search for Edward's sister, and unearth the darkness that lies beneath the picturesque surface.

Key features

• "I am not alone": explore 1920s coastal Norway accompanied by a living, breathing, independent companion
• Interact with your companion, Lissie, through a realistic and dynamic dialogue system
• Experience a thrilling tale through the eyes of an increasingly unreliable narrator
• Find your own path through a scenic setting that changes with the weather and Edward's mental state
• "A story about what lies beneath": piece together a gripping narrative with unexpected twists and turns

Additional features

• A beautiful original musical score from award-winning composer Simon Poole (Dreamfall, The Secret World, The Park, Dreamfall Chapters)
• Written by Ragnar Tørnquist (The Longest Journey, Dreamfall, The Secret World, Dreamfall Chapters)
• Designed and developed by the team behind Dreamfall Chapters
• Fully voiced in English, with motion-captured characters

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What do you lot think? I confess I am somewhat biased as I was born in Norway, but the screenshots look amazing and the music in the launch trailer... Not gonna lie, I got pretty emotional listening to it

 

[Dionysos]

That does look and sound beautiful...

I had never heard of this before you mentioned it the other day but I am intrigued.

I’ve enjoyed 'mystery' games like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. This looks like something combining similar vibes with an interesting partner mechanics and a more lived-in world.

The only issue I have with this is that I am a mere console peasant. I'll probably be waiting a long, long time for a version to be released on the PlayStation Store, if ever it does.

I'm more likely going to have to watch a Let's Play series of this. I doubt my PC could really handle anything so beautiful.

 

[Linnaete]

As a casual fan of psychological thrillers and adventure games who is friends with a coworker who followed this game because she's a fan of the developer's previous offering (Dreamfall Chapters, which admittedly I haven't experienced for myself), we sat down this past weekend to give Draugen a shot, as we too were enchanted by the premise of a mystery game set in a bizarrely abandoned but picturesque Norwegian fishing hamlet.

Our initial impressions were chiefly to marvel at this game's visuals and distinctive art style. When you stop to soak in the scenery and atmosphere of the town of Graavik while it's illuminated by bright sunlight during the day, the picture book-esque art style grandly stands out, and everything reminds us of a postcard. It absolutely helps that the developers chose a setting that is both representative of rural Norway and something astonishingly distinctive and picturesque without being fantastical. The town of Graavik is situated in front of a glistening fjord and flanked on three sides by towering, snow-capped peaks, meaning there is a soothing cosiness to the atmosphere of this quiet, nestled little town.

Well, that would be the case, but the central mystery of Draugen is why this hamlet is abandoned and seemingly devoid of life.

I really appreciate the attempts made by the developers to convey natural eeriness and the couple of occasional tense, heart-racing moments without resorting to cheap jump scares, with the small exception of one early scene during a thunderclap in the middle of a storm.

Okay, so the game's initial central mystery revolves around the protagonist's desire to find his missing sister, who is sort of a badass 1920s Lois Lane, and had allegedly sailed from the United States to rural Norway only to seemingly disappear without contact. Then upon arrival at the town, the game introduces a second chief mystery: where are the residents of this abandoned fishing hamlet and what happened to this place? So two concurrent mysteries with one being intimately personal to Edward. Are these two mysteries independent of each other or are they connected somehow? Simple, interesting premise.

Spoiler

Then later on the narrative strangely elects to demote the mystery of the town as one of its chief focus in favour of a set of unraveling twists that centre on Edward's...I believe it's a form of dissociative identity disorder? I hesitate to call it that as the personae of both Alice and this literal winged angel entity are very autonomous personalities themselves, acknowledge on more than one occasion that they are a part of Edward, and are the only true "individuals" whom have kept him company for all these years since his traumatic childhood. Yes, the narrative's ultimate series of twists is that Edward isn't in a healthy mental state; his pursuit of his "sister" is evidently unhealthy, and she is ultimately revealed to be a manifestation he created as a result of having never been able to let go of his real sister's tragic death from three decades ago.

The game thankfully doesn't turn either of Edward's personae into antagonists and nor does it genuinely condemn the man, but it doesn't have anything profound to say or explore about the subject. That's fine as it is, but I would much prefer if it had been honest about its intentions from the outset, rather than just make the story twist yet another case of: uh oh, our main character has a mental condition! That it takes until roughly the two-thirds mark to unravel Edward's mental state and the true nature of Alice utterly detracts from what should be the central conceit of this mystery detective game: what the bloody hell happened to this town and its inhabitants?

Bizarrely, though I acknowledge that we may have missed something vital, either by overlooking a clue or because we simply don't understand Norwegian and the protagonist only has a basic grasp of the language, the game does not definitively give full closure to the mystery of Graavik. What was exactly discovered in the mines that first triggered a need to silence the miner who initially discovered it, culminating in misfortune first befalling the town? If the whole notion of a town curse is simply a self-fulfilling prophecy and not caused by anything paranormal (I don't think anything in Draugen is attributed to the paranormal), what exactly happened to all the townsfolk? Were there people who left? Were there murder-suicides? Was this a case of a divided town having fueled by mistrust, paranoia and a lack of communication just killing each other? What does the title 'Draugen' even mean in this context? A metaphor for looming tragedy and death? I read somewhere that there's a small hint in Norwegian that someone crossed the fjord and back and introduced tubercolosis to the village, which certainly helped perpetuate and exacerbate the residents' belief in a curse not dissimilar to a belief in a folklore creature like Draugr literally bringing death from across the waters. Whether the latter is the case I don't really know for sure.

Yeah, the game is only around a few hours long. If you see it on sale, definitely consider picking it up, especially if you're also into psychological thrillers and more laid-back mystery adventure games. Also get it just to enjoy this brilliant dynamic between the stuffy, overly serious Edward and the exuberant Alice.