In Phoenix Springs, it’s not so much the ravishing hand-drawn visuals that first grab the attention, but the voice of narrator and protagonist Iris. Befitting her name, she behaves like a roving eye, investigating and describing her surroundings with a clinical, almost robotic detachment. Yet Iris is no blank slate: you quickly come to learn that she is a snob with little regard for the homeless. She even appears to have short shrift for the player, delivering a withering putdown when you make a connection she deems just a little too obvious.
Iris, a tech journalist by trade, is the perfect protagonist for a point-and-click adventure, a genre whose mechanics often begin with the simple act of looking. Eventually, in classics like Grim Fandango and the Monkey Island series, you advance the narrative by combining objects in increasingly esoteric ways. But in Phoenix Springs, it’s not objects you’re combining but ideas; it’s not an inventory you’re delving into but a sprawling mindmap. There are shades of Disco Elysium’s Thought Cabinet here. In Studio Zaum’s 2019 detective classic, the mechanic played a supporting role. In Phoenix Springs, it carries the whole game.
Ideas-as-inventory is an elegant revision of point-and-click mechanics, transforming what can often feel like an opaque and sometimes clunky genre into something more supple, streamlined, and modern. These ideas aren’t just reminders of the plot but tools to wield in the game and thematic anchors to mull over while playing it. They also function as red herrings in a narrative that moves quickly: Iris’ brother, an esteemed bioethicist called Leo Dormer, has gone missing, and she is trying to find him.
In one early scene, Iris travels to his university, which has recently been destroyed by student protests. Amid its ruins, ravers are hosting a multiday sleep deprivation party (without the aid of chemicals, they stress), soundtracked by murky, pulsating techno. Iris doesn’t “get it,” nor does she seem to understand anything vaguely countercultural. The mystery deepens. In this near-future scenario, censorship is the norm; the privileged sleep in stasis pods. What is going on, and where in the world is Leo Dormer?
Like Disco Elysium, there is a peculiarity to Phoenix Springs whose world is inspired by our own, features many of the same objects and similar kinds of locations, yet diverges in enough unsettling ways to feel deeply confounding. You come across a gigantic ladder in the desert at the top of which sits a rocking chair and a solar-powered radio. There is an oasis in the middle of said desert populated by a community whose residents seem condemned to speak in strange, elliptical phrases. Rotting fruit is strewn about the place. The mood is never less than uncanny.
The visuals — bold, hyper-stylized illustrations set against rough, painterly textures — add to the sense of unease. Phoenix Springs is a game of abundant negative space with large parts of the screen blocked out by slabs of shimmering color and darkened shadow. As Iris traipses through eerie, empty buildings and unnaturally lush ruins, she has a tendency to almost disappear into the environment, as if her very physical being is compromised. The negative space extends to characters whose innermost feelings and motivations remain obscure throughout. The plot is never less than cryptic, even as you are seemingly able to unravel it.
The beguiling spell that Phoenix Springs casts is only intermittently broken by its sometimes obtuse puzzles. In the university, having completed much of the ostensibly more challenging sleuthing, my progress was halted by simply overlooking a key object. But getting stumped is never a dealbreaker. Pausing the game brings up a list of tips: there is even a button that whisks you away to an external webpage featuring a guide for the entire game. Does offering a walkthrough betray a lack of confidence, or perhaps conviction, in the game’s puzzles? I don’t think so. The makers of Phoenix Springs, a three-person art collective spread across the UK and France, don’t care if you “git gud”; they just want to tell you a bizarre, unsettling story.
The weirdness is precisely the point. Nods to bioethics, toxic fungi, and the “green crater in the heart of the desert” evoke the weird fiction of Jeff VanderMeer (as popularized in the author’s Southern Reach series of novels). Phoenix Springs is also a compelling neo-noir, albeit one that, for a large part, takes place in the blindingly bright sunlight. That is a little weird, too.
Yet even as the game mutates into an odder metaphysical shape than its detective premise seemed to initially suggest, it does not sag or lose any potency. On the contrary, the game becomes more powerful as it becomes clear just how far Iris is willing to go in order to follow her little brother and restore their connection. Throughout it all, Leo Dormer remains at the center of her mind map; he remains the one constant in Iris’ thoughts.
Phoenix Springs launches October 7th on PC.