"Dordogne" is a beautiful adventure game with a special "Ghibli-esque" hand-drawn art-style created by UMANIMATION a French transmedia animation production company and the development studio "Un Je Ne Sais Quoi".
The story is about a young woman called Mimi, who travels to her grandparent's house after her grandmother Nora's death. The last summer Mimi spent with her grandmother is many years ago and she hopes to gain back her memories that she lost since her last visit. The house is located next to the scenic river Dordogne in France and this is where the majority of the game takes place.
In the abandoned house the adult girl will explore and find objects which will trigger a memory from her childhood from the last summer she has spent there. During these memories young Mimi is spending time with her grandmother and going on adventures where she meets a boy called Renaud. Renaud tells her about a fantastical dragon called Le Coulobre that he wishes to find somewhere in the river.
The gameplay is fairly easy, you walk from location to location and often solve fairly easy mini-games, mostly offering some controller input based challenges. For example there is a mini-game to brush Mimi's teeth where you use both controller sticks
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to move Mimi's left and right hand. Additionally there are many collectibles to find like stickers, audio cassettes, words, recordable noises, photos and letters. By the end of each day young Mimi will take some time to create a page in her binder about the adventures she had, by using the collected photos, words, stickers and noises for the pages. It adds a nice personal touch to the otherwise simple and limited gameplay.
The presentation of Dordogne is the biggest highlight. It looks like an anime movie from Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service). The backgrounds are stunning hand-painted image projected on 3D objects and the characters are animated like cartoon characters. The beautiful soundtrack composed by Supernaive is oscillating between melancholy and wonder. The voice acting is quite good, unfortunately it's only limited to a few cut scenes and most of the in-game conversations are not voiced.
The game is fairly short with around 3-5 hours of playtime, split into 7 chapters. There is a chapter select for when you missed any of the collectibles or missed any of the optional achievements. For the locations of all the collectibles I used the following guide:
https://intoindiegames.com/walkthroughs/dordogne-collectible... Unfortunately there is a missable achievement that requires you to have young Mimi use the toilet in each chapter in 1 playthrough without using chapter select. I missed it on my first run, so I had to replay the game. For more details about this achievement see:
In summary I enjoyed Dordogne a lot. It's a heartwarming and relaxing game about a girl reliving hear childhood summer memories with her grandmother, with beautiful, unique visuals and a nice soundtrack. Definitely a hidden indie gem.
4.0