Harmony: The Fall of Reverie

This game is okay, but it's not one I'd recommend. I loved the voice acting and some of the characters. (Chaos is are a lot of fun.) The art is pretty good. The backgrounds make Atina look like a colorful and eclectic place to live. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that the reason they made this game a visual novel was that they didn't have the resources to make it into an adventure game like Life is Strange. And they don't know what makes visual novels good. Instead, they just rush the plot along and gloss over events that could be exciting, suspenseful or climactic. You hear about protests and violence in the streets secondhand through dialogue. You hear about major characters in harrowing situations and the story doesn't even focus on them until after it's over. It's like the game is trying to make its story moments as boring and watered down as possible. The pacing is all over the place. You go from rushing through the villain's grand plan all in one act to taking two entire acts to grieve the death of a character. Having multiple routes through a chapter means that there's never a wrong answer to how to solve the main problem. There are no bad endings, and you can see where every path leads in the flow chart. Unfortunately, this means that you learn early on that there are no stakes to your choices. I just ended up focusing on the few characters I liked and didn't bother caring about outcomes. And let's get back to the characters. The voice actors carry a lot of the game with what they're given, because unfortunately, the writing is not there for many of them. Some of the characters are gods of specific ideals (Aspirations) who have only one character trait by design, and they still manage to be more developed than some of the human characters. The protagonist's step sister in particular is given quite a lot of screen time to never have anything useful to say. Abigail Thorn is a wonderful voice actor, but there's only so much she can do to polish a turd.

First of all, Harmony is a visual novel : you're presented with a web of nodes, you select which one you want to pursue next, and go from there. Some might unlock or reveal future nodes in advance, some give or take the currencies of the game, different kinds of crystals. The same currencies are needed to be able to select some of the nodes, and therefore choices. Don't expect gameplay here - and that's fine: it's a visual novel after all. Harmony does a lot of things right, and then falls down badly on the one that does truly matter : storytelling. The art style, characters, voice acting, music are all excellent. The world described feels alive, and interesting. You'll want to learn more about the characters and follow their subplots, including romance (with really good LGBT+ representations, to boot). Then the "Choices matter" part completely falls apart : main plot points are forced no matter what, the big bad guys (a corporation) never feels real or represented in game properly, and simply vanishes at some point. There's a fantastic part about going through grief - and personal pain plus a social commentary on capitalist autocracies seemed like great ingredients for a story that talked about family and community, tying it all together. Except that story isn't there, and the ending feels hollow of meaning. In the end, my choices didn't matter all that much - and in a game where that's all there is, I treat this as a cardinal sin.

I don't like that it makes relationships analytical. I don't want to be a master manipulator, I want to craft an emotional story that will resonated with me. I also don't like how it constantly breaks immersion by moving between the story and the graph where you make choices.

Enjoyed the art and the interesting "other world where you hang out with the archetypes of the human psyche" thing, but the cast of the game was so utterly insufferable that the stakes meant nothing to me, with some of your "friends" doing nothing except whining and complaining and crying 95% of the time they're on screen. I also have to question the "My grandpa is so emotionally healthy that he just loves getting cucked and explicitly loved less than someone else by grandma. Doesn't bother him at all. What a truly healthy man." That's not healthy brother, that's called deep self-loathing. The story is heavily railroaded, with most of your decisions leading to really no meaningful differences in how the story ultimately plays out, and the "true" ending was particularly lazy with how to resolves the conflict. Prose was alright, but nothing special, and soundtrack was forgettable. Clearly needed another editing pass to weed out gems like "Sometimes the right thing to do is unethical." and "It's hard to go missing on an island like this." "How many people go missing?" "Who knows, they go missing all the time."

The art style is good as well as the soundtrack. But unfortunately, especially for a visual novel, I found the story to be boring and not saying much. 4/10

I guess it's on me, but I don't get this. I gave it the first chapter and the beter part of an hour, but I'm just not getting into it, and for a visual novel I don't feel like I should have to bargain with myself as to why I should continue. I don't feel any sympathy for any characters and I don't feel like I'm made aware of why anything that happends is happening or what the dilemma I'm apparently so traumatized by is supposed to be. It feels like I need to read a wikipedia page about what the setup for this story is even supposed to be about, but sorry, that's not happening.

I am beyond frustrated with the dizzying amount of interruptions and screen transitions. First an overbearing tutorial, then swapping back and forth between dialogue scenes and the augural board after just a few lines of text, I felt actually sick playing this. Story and characters seem to be interesting enough, but I lost all excitement for them after seeing that the augural board part of the game heavily pushes the player to forego the flow of relationships and pre-plan decisions to accumulate necessary amount of points for desired chapter endings.

The game is beautifully illustrated/animated, the music is soothing, the voice acting is fantastic. There is a nuanced plot that has a strong message about our modern world and community. It's well-designed and clearly a passion project. I recommend this game with a caveat - if you're struggling with how sh!t the world is currently and are feeling crushed and depressed under the weight of it all (esp. if you're living in the US in 2026), maybe wait to play this. The first half was fun, the second half I dragged myself through because it felt TOO REAL. I play video games to get a little window of escape from the dumpster fire that is our country and corrupt companies/billionaires dragging us towards WWIII, and realizing I was playing a choices-matter video game about that as a microcosm was...not fun. I dragged myself thru the end because I wanted to try for a happy ending in the video game at least, but man, it was emotionally exhausting getting there.

Should you be curious about this game, get it on sale. It is worth neither your time nor your money. [i]Harmony[/i] is a visual novel that goes all out on the [i]visual[/i] part. It's beautiful, colourful, with animated characters and full cutscenes. However, it fails hard at the [i]novel[/i] part. The text is not pleasant to read, the scenes don't connect smoothly depending on your choices, and the writing in general feels so immature. It's like a teenager writing what they believe activism is about. That's another issue : it's not really a story about two worlds and the repercussions they have on each other. It's a story about fighting a corporation, and it would still stand without the supernatural elements. It's like they were added just to appeal to a certain fanbase. Most characters are flat and you don't get attached to them, nor do you care about what happens to them. Some were saved by the fantastic voice acting, but not even all of them. (Mostly the Aspirations.) The Augural is a nice idea, but it could have been so much more. It doesn't feel impactful to make choices when you see so little of their consequences. And it feels useless to click on nodes when there is only one choice. The end of Act 3 was kind of cool because choices really felt like you were battling against your opponents and had to think about what to do and plan ahead. Otherwise... waste of a good idea. Badly executed. It's also really tedious to replay, because there's no auto-skipping text you've already seen, and no skipping cutscenes at all. At the end of the day, the most fun I had with this game was skipping all the dialogue (even the lines I hadn't seen yet) and just playing it like a puzzle to get a certain number of crystals. Definitely one of the worst games I've played. There are some good elements to it, but it was made by people who had a message to send, not a story to tell, and thought of visual novels as "low-cost games" rather than an actual genre.