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1-7 of 72 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Lovelorn letters... with a twist, May 16, 2024The first thing that struck me about this game was the UI. It’s gorgeous! The softly textured main background, the handwriting fonts (with choices so you can pick one that you find most readable), the paper-like background for the text. It’s the perfect aesthetic for the story; there’s even a little quill you click to continue!
The story itself has a compelling start, with Isabelle having suddenly had to leave her home and return to the village she thought she’d left forever, now separated from her lover, Olympia, and pouring out her longing for reunion in her letters. What exactly happened is revealed slowly in bits and pieces (although on a second replay, when I chose a different option early on, I found that the explanation came together more quickly), and it was satisfying to put the pieces together, figuring out Isabelle’s background and why she had to suddenly leave the city.
Sometimes I didn’t feel like I was entirely following the ups and downs of the relationship as time and Isabelle’s letters went on, as we only get Isabelle’s side of the correspondence, but the tension between the two, the strain that the inciting incident and the distance was putting on their relationship—the way the distance allowed mistrust and suspicions to creep in, both jumping to conclusions about each other—was gripping to read and made me invested in the conclusion. I was less interested in the external plot going on around Isabelle, though, and because the ending focused in on that plotline, it fell a little flat for me.
Two other notes, first on the interactivity. I can’t help but compare this to other epistolary IF works I’ve played, and unlike in First Draft of the Revolution or Something Blue, in DJL the player/protagonist isn’t choosing what pieces of information to share with Olympia, or what spin to put on them; rather, you’re deciding which of the offered choices is actually true. Or at least, that was my interpretation after multiple playthroughs, and I felt almost like this gave me too much power over the story; things that felt like small choices in the moment ended up being major shapers of the way events played out, in ways I wasn’t prepared for.
Finally, I know this was translated from French under a time crunch, and that showed a bit, with some confusing phrasing or word mix-ups. This wasn’t a major distraction, but it made the reading experience a bit bumpy at times and created another barrier to my feeling like I’d fully grasped everything. I’m glad the translation was finished in time for Spring Thing, though, as I enjoyed the story and had fun playing through it!
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Doctor doctor give me the news, May 14, 2024I can’t think of a piece of IF that’s made me feel dumber than Doctor Jeangille’s Letters. That’s not because it’s got fiendish brainteasers or elevated-but-gnomic prose, I should say – on those scores, this epistolary mystery is accessible to a fault. No, it’s because the game’s eponymous letters are written in a script-handwriting font that after ten minutes started bothering my aging eyes, and only after I’d given myself a headache by persevering to the end did I realize 1) there’s a settings menu in the corner that allows you to shift to something more readable; and 2) I’d actually noticed this menu when I started playing, jotted down a note about the cunning way it rotates in and out of view when summoned, then promptly forgot about it. So yeah, if the game gave me eyestrain, I have only myself to blame – although, now that I think about it, if it hadn’t been so compelling it would have been easier for me to stop, close my eyes for a bit, and consider changing the font, so maybe we should just say the fault is 50/50?
The idea of telling a story entirely through letters goes back almost to the beginning of the history of the novel – partially because in a time of widespread letter-writing, the format added a touch of immediacy and verisimilitude, much as today’s works of fiction (static or interactive) may incorporate emails or social media posts as gestures towards realism, but also because making each chapter its own letter provides a clean structure that wraps up each segment of the tale while inviting the reader to flip another page and see what happens next. So it is with Doctor Jeangille’s Letters, each of which ends on some note that points towards the next exciting development to come. At first, this is simply a matter of wanting to see how the eponymous heroine gets on after she returns to her small French hometown; she’s coming back with a medical degree and a mandate to minister to the health of her former neighbors, but she’s also fleeing a scandal in the capital, one that seems to be wrapped up with the lovely Olympia, to whom her overheated missives are directed. She attempts to push pass the farmers’ wariness of a female doctor; she weathers her parents’ misguided attempts at matchmaking; she meets a charming noblewoman who’s taken up temporary residence in the town, and tries to keep Olympia from feeling jealous. Soon matters escalate beyond this domestic melodrama, however; first livestock goes missing, then one of the village’s children…
The irony powering the game’s engine is that it’s able to go big even as it’s staying small. The prose is all overheated Romantic gushing. Here’s the good doctor on her parting from Olympia:
"The breeze danced with your chestnut curls, untangling and entangling your so lovely locks. Your flushed cheeks, on which I had laid my kisses only moments earlier, were now beaded with tears. Your hand, which had refused to let me go, trembled."
Her inamorata’s eyes are “emeralds”; when she considers her grievances, “rage consumed my body inside out, for at that moment, I was only flame.” It’s gloriously over the top, and if it’s occasionally a little silly and marred by the occasional maladroit word choice, it nonetheless is deeply enjoyable, and clearly establishes the doctor’s passionate but often-ingenuous personality.
The writing nonetheless is capable of subtlety, too. Olympia’s replies to the doctor, for example, are never visible, but reading between the lines it’s possible to get glimpses of what she’s like – and my sense was that she’s decidedly more pragmatic, and observant, than her lover realizes. The choice mechanics are also understated. For most of the game, interaction involves clicking on a key sentence or two in each letter to cycle it between various options, before choosing which one to include in the letter’s final draft. These options don’t generally lead to significantly different decisions, but rather give the player a chance to add slight shading to the doctor’s impressions of someone they’ve newly met, or express either certainty or qualms about a particular course of action. This does mean that every once in a while, I was surprised by the way an obliquely-phrased choice wound up being interpreted, but on the whole that’s in keeping with the doctor’s impulsive nature.
So long as I’m listing flaws, I should say that the game’s mystery plot is not exactly a head-scratcher, and the doctor’s inability to put two and two together occasionally risks drifting across the line separating a laudable desire to think well of people from simple thick-headedness. And the ending I got was exciting and wrapped up the story well, but I was also surprised that my choices didn’t put the doctor in substantially more peril than she wound up experiencing (on the other hand, in an epistolary piece it’s a little hard to sustain suspense about the fate of the protagonist – “Dear Olympia, then I was horribly murdered” is a letter that’s not going to make it into the post – so there’s an argument for just embracing the plot-protection that comes with the format). But this is an endearing, engaging game, with likeable characters and an enjoyable interaction mechanic, so much so that I can’t even hold the eyestrain headache it gave me against it.
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Dearest Ren*****, let me tell you about my day..., May 13, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review, English version
Played: 4/9/24
Playtime: 1.75hrs, all but 1st on FF, 3.5 endings
Epistolary works - fictions composed of purported real world text artifacts - are a compelling conceit. They allow for indirect world and character building where the reader is assembling an oblique narrative in their head. Part of the joy of these kinds of work is watching it evolve and click into place. The other part is the charge ‘real world documents’ give to the proceedings. A lot hinges on the form of those documents - they need to be a fine balance of plausible and informative. In particular, any sense that the documents are aimed at a third party reader (us!) instead of their in-world targets can undermine everything it wants to achieve.
I am delighted to report Jeangille just crushes the form of it. From its graphical presentation, its font use, to the measured content of the faux-missives we are drip-fed a tale of forbidden love and forbidden… other stuff. I found it unimpeachable in its conceit, almost never cracking to the pressures of info-dump to uninformed third party. Rather, it was deliberate in alluding to events the correspondents clearly understood in a way to slowly and naturally bring us up to speed. In particular, the mercurial tone of the author was nicely observed - they are not in the same monotone mood throughout their notes. Longing, anger, depression, new fascinations, petty jealousy, all are on display underscoring the fullness of the protagonist and the emotional passage of time. The crucial element here is the correspondents’ fascination with ‘gossip,’ allowing for plot-relevant events to be conveyed without artifice.
The language of the letters equally does some heavy lifting here. Its Romantic formality is the right balance of omnipresent but conceding to modern sensibilities in a way that allows us to acknowledge but not be distracted.
The interactiveness of the piece leverages its strengths in a dynamite way - periodically we are given opportunity to shade emotions, events and attitudes by selecting among alternatives. When done well, it has the precise flavor of composing a letter! Toying with a variety of subjects and phrasings to convey exactly what we want and putting us firmly in the protagonist’s chair. If I had any notes here, it would be that it was more powerfully realized when the page was blank below the choice, and filled in after, rather than embedded in otherwise unchangeable text. That underscored the ‘composing a letter’ dynamic that was so cool.
Through these interactive choices, the plot proceeds to a climax of which, depending on how your choices landed throughout the correspondence, I found 3.5 possible endings. And here’s where I can’t keep being coy about the plot, will try to spoiler my way through it.
We all know what is arguably the most famous epistolary novel, right? (LINK IS A SPOILER) It’s so foundational, it becomes a trope of that genre in other works. (LINKS ALSO SPOILERS) Ok, fine. (Spoiler - click to show)Vampires. The prior art is Vampires. Those resonances are so pronounced that even the slightest supporting event, alluded to most obliquely, immediately sets off alarm bells in the head and everything forward is contorted through that lens. We are ahead of the narrator, biting our nails for the inevitable escalation. Or better, awaiting the knowing twist from the author that crushes our expectations most delightfully.
The latter does not happen here and in another format that might be a slight let down. I mean it is here too, but it is more than compensated by the interactivity. As a player, we can low-key steer things into various endings in a VERY satisfying way so what we lose in meta-surprise we more than gain in the narrative collaboration. There is still a slight issue here, so slight I hesitate to bring it up, but I’m in this far. At the climactic decision we are meta-empowered to drive to a conclusion, clearly conveyed by the choice wordings. On a single playthrough, it is not clear how deeply our prior choices inform things, and we might be tempted to metagame it in an unsatisfying way. I didn’t, but I dwelt on the choice enough to recognize the peril. That musing itself pulled me out of the narrative flow at least a little bit. In one sense it might be more powerful if those final choices were less broad, instead informed by prior selections. (Turns out there are other options that ARE so constrained.) In another sense though, that might backpressure replayability, burying its strengths under opaque gameplay that the wordiness could not sustain. After much reflection, I think the right choice was made. What a relief for the author!
Because even this minor quibble faded on repeat plays. My admiration only increased for the work in the sense that the 3.5 endings I got were all different, yet satisfying conclusions to a choice architecture that allowed me to build naturally to each one. Ok, not the 1/2 ending, that one made me play-mad, but the rest for sure.
So that’s my conclusion. A well-realized, graphically compelling, tightly controlled work with satisfying plot arcs under player control. Who knew tampering with post could be so fun?
Mystery, Inc: Daphne
Vibe: Snail Mail
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : I think, were it my project, I would double down on the ‘composing a letter’ paradigm and stage the text rather than provide inline options. Now I SAY that, but there is every possibility the reality of that would not be as satisfying as I think, and I’d end up reverting it anyway.
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Epistolary Mystery, March 27, 2024Feeling angry, hurt, betrayed, le Docteur must leave for the countryside, banished from the educated and cultured social circles of the city. Fortunately, a sophisticated high-class Lady comes to live in the village shortly after, providing at least some measure of worldly and literary conversation.
Through a series of letters to the lover left in the city, we learn about the goings-on in the peasant town, the background of this high-class Lady, and the events leading to le Docteur's banishment.
The story plays in the past, perhaps 3 centuries ago. It’s an impressive tour de force on the part of the author to write the letters so consistently in the voice and style of a cultured person from that age, distinguished yet emotional, full of purplish expressions without dropping out of character.
The epistolary form the author has chosen lends itself perfectly to a gradual build-up of the mystery at the heart of the story. The letters are one-sided, we only ever see the perspective of le Docteur. They start off as an account of a lover’s yearning, a lament over the circumstances of their parting. Slowly, the focus shifts to the letter-writer’s new living circumstances: the village of Meaux with its peasants and farmers, its livestock and farmlands. Throughout the most part of the narrative, le Docteur is preoccupied with securing the attention of the lover left behind, recounting amusing or strange events in the village and avowing undying love and desire.
Underneath this light and gossipy tone, the reader gleans more and more threatening fragments of an unfolding mystery, while the protagonist remains oblivious of the possibility of this looming danger. The distance of the reader to the events described in the letters leaves room to see correlations that remain invisible for the letter-writer, who is too close to see the bigger picture. Of course, from an out-of-game perspective, it’s also the case that the reader is capable of expecting a turn of circumstances that is impossible to prepare for from within the story-viewpoint.
Le Docteur's letters speak of intense emotions of love and longing towards the left-behind lover, and the reader is an engaged, empathetic witness, often even flinching at jealous words of accusation or egocentric and manipulatively twisting arguments. Until the very end, the love story remains the main focus, the mystery serving to heighten the tension without ever taking control of the narrative.
Very tense and touching. Among the best I’ve read.
- Lilie Bagage (Lyon, France), March 14, 2024
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A richly described series of love letters set in the 1800s, with a mystery, March 12, 2024Whew! This game strained my poor Anglophone brain, as it is written in a fancy style of French and a cursive font. There is a very large amount of text as well, so I had to use all my forces to persevere!
But the story itself was interesting enough to carry on. It consists of letters written between two women, although I believe every letter is from the point of view of Isabella, a woman who became a doctor in Paris before being ejected and forced to return to the village of her home. Her lover, Olympia, is left behind. Isabella must face the disapproval and suspicions of the villagers, as well as Olympia's jealousies when the pale, anemic, and beautiful Alice moves in next door.
Gameplay is a bit curious; as at least one other person noted on the forums, it bears some resemblance to The First Draft of the Revolution, where you select different cycling variations before confirming and moving on.
However, there are very large chunks of text between choices (large for me, maybe not for native speaker). These large gaps, and my suspicion that the choices didn't change much of the game, led me to assign a mental score of 4.
However, I had early on, in a separate window, clicked through quickly to see how long the game would be, and received an ending with a clear choice (to (Spoiler - click to show)destroy your letters or not). I was surprised when, in my real playthrough, I never encountered that passage. I used saves and found 2 endings in my own playthrough, and they were quite interesting. So when it became clear that this was actually fairly complex, I upgraded to five stars.
Un drame épistolaire , March 9, 2024A travers une série de lettres envoyéez, on découvre le retour à contrecœur d'une docteur dans son village natal ainsi que le drame qui ne manque pas de s'y produire.
Au lieu d'avoir directement plusieurs liens pour choisir la suite de la lettre, ici ce sont quelques phrases que nous faisons varier avant de les valider.
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