I’ve been intrigued for a while about Déraciné: From Software’s experimental PSVR title based in a French boarding school. Was it a ghost story, a mystery, an adventure or some kind of oddball horror game. Would it be twee, spooky, strange or disappointingly generic. Having played a substantial demo drawn from three sections of the game, I’m still not sure. Déraciné could be all of the above. It might be none of them.
Donning the PSVR headset, you become an entity the children know only as ‘the fairy’. The game’s main sequences appear to be frozen moments in time, where characters stand stuck in a fraction of a second, waiting for the story to continue. They can’t see you and you can only interact with a small number of objects. You can use the Move controllers to grab and manipulate these. The same goes for memories; glowing, golden floating orbs which trigger spectral flashback episodes. These give you vital hints on what you need to do.
The game’s other key mechanic involves a kind of lifeforce, which you can drain from one object to give to another with the aid of your ghostly magic ring. For example, in the earliest portion of the demo you’re in a classroom where a girl holds a dead and wilted flower. Find a living one, use the ring to suck up its lifeforce, and you can then bring the flower back to life. It’s an interesting mechanic which you’d like to experiment with, but it seems at the moment that it only works with very specific objects, meaning your options are fairly closed.
The same goes for how you explore the school. It might be that there will be more navigation options in the final game, but for now you use buttons on the move controller to rotate your view and the big Move button to shift from one glowing point to another. This can make it weirdly awkward to get yourself in the right place facing in the right direction to activate an object – something I smacked up against numerous times while playing the demo.
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I know it doesn’t sound that promising so far, and I wasn’t entirely convinced by the second section of the demo, which involves finding five herbs that have – for some reason – been locked inside small glass vials being held by different children. I won’t even go into why you need to do this. Finding them is mostly a matter of keen observation, noticing that one is with a dog while another might be with a certain boy, then tracking down where the dog and the boy look to have gone. One vial required unlocking a chest, which meant finding the key, but that’s about as far as the actual puzzles went.
In short, there’s something oddly fascinating about Déraciné’s gameplay, but you can’t help hoping that there’s something meatier to get your teeth into.
I genuinely hope so, because what I do like about From’s game is its atmosphere. It reminds me strangely of Konami’s Shadow of Memories and some of the other oddball games that emerged in the early years of the PS2; games that drifted away from action to be more about exploring, observing and going through a deeply weird experience. There’s something peculiar and melancholy at work here, and I’m sure there’s more going on than immediately meets the eye. Who is the fairy? Where do your powers come from? Are there other strange forces at work within the school?
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You can also see From’s eye for setting and detail in the scenery, the furniture, the grounds outside the school and the depiction of the different schoolkids. It feels like a rich, coherent little world that needs exploring, where you want to get to know what’s going on with all the different characters and find out what hides behind the school’s locked doors. And with its soft, photogenic lighting and shades of sepia and green, Déraciné is one of the most beautiful VR games I’ve seen.
First Impressions
It’s still hard to know what to make of Déraciné. It’s boarding school setting is a work of art, but you’re oddly limited in how you can explore it. It seems to be setting up some fascinating mysteries, yet the early puzzles I’ve seen seem either too mundane or wilfully obscure. Apparently, all the different threads to pull together to form a wider narrative, but at the moment it’s impossible to piece together what kind of narrative that is.
All the same, there’s something strange and haunting about From’s game and its story that left me wanting more as the demo ended, while From has never been one to put out a half-assed title. I’m not sure Déraciné will be a PSVR blockbuster, but I think it’s going to be one very interesting VR experience.
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