Phoenix Springs Review

Credit is due to anyone brave enough to challenge the status quo, and Calligram Studios does just that with Phoenix Springs. This game is part point-and-click adventure, part dissertation for surrealist art philosophers, and part Twin Peaks-inspired fever dream.

It begins simply enough: you step into the shoes of Iris Dormer, a journalist investigating the disappearance of her brother, Leo. The game’s near-future dystopian world initially feels both eerily empty and claustrophobic, wrapped in a crumbling tech-noir aesthetic. In this city, ravers dance for days in abandoned buildings without the aid of stimulants, testing their limits. Libraries are strewn with overturned bookshelves filled with references to bioscience, hinting at a failed social experiment. Youths sift through rubbish for scraps to sell. But once you reach the enigmatic destination of Phoenix Springs, the world opens up to reveal lush greenery, ramshackle cabins, and broken bridges—yet the emptiness and oddness of the city persist in the landscape.

The art is outstanding, characterised by thick, rough lines that give life to grainy, hand-drawn animations, coloured with a muted palette of blues, yellows, greys, and greens. Iris herself is difficult to distinguish outside of key cutscenes, just as the story is elusive. Often, you’re simply guiding a silhouette through this strange environment. While she appears as a female figure, Iris—like many of the characters you encounter—remains frustratingly distant and hard to understand.

Her detached nature is reinforced by her vocal performance: a clipped, monotone delivery that provides brief, staccato descriptions of the world around her. It’s as if she’s exhausted, pushing forward not out of passion, but out of obligation. There’s no excitement or emotion here, only a sense of weary resolve. But this impassive tone gradually adds to the atmosphere, once you acclimatise to its jarring effect. The characters she meets are equally impersonal, identified only by descriptors like "patient man" or "humming woman." They don’t have voices of their own, only Iris’s clinical recitation of their interactions.

Instead of a traditional inventory, Phoenix Springs replaces it with a mind map of clues and ideas. It’s a clever evolution of the typical point-and-click formula, allowing you to combine a name with a terminal to search for information, or link knowledge from a book with a statue to uncover more. This system feels like a natural progression from the genre's old formula of combining random objects just to see what works. Mind map entries grey out after use but can reawaken as new details emerge, keeping the puzzles engaging even as the plot becomes harder to decipher.

That is, until the game’s final third. At this point, both the story and gameplay take a wild, unpredictable turn. The mind map mechanic is replaced by something far less intuitive, making it harder to maintain a sense of direction. Here, you’ll either dig in and keep going or lose patience entirely. Phoenix Springs feels like an abstract painting you’re trying to interpret, and while that can hold your interest for a while, the increasingly cryptic story becomes difficult to follow. Characters start engaging in bizarre activities—baking bricks or inventing new languages—while muttering phrases that seem deliberately obscure. Iris herself comments on their irrelevant responses, but this doesn’t make the experience any less confusing. The oasis becomes a maze of repetitive cabins, fields, and water, where extracting meaning from the unwilling characters feels like an exhausting task. Solving a puzzle and adding a new word to the mind map provides relief, but it lacks the satisfying rush of achievement.

The developer takes a daring step by offering players access to the complete solution through the game’s interface. This suggests the journey is more important than the outcome—a notion supported by the game’s 78 achievements. Experimenting with different combinations of clues and characters reveals fragments of meaning, helping to unravel the mystery over multiple playthroughs. However, fully appreciating the game requires patience, as Phoenix Springs treats players with an almost chilly indifference. By the end, some might see it as a game-changing narrative experience, akin to what some consider Mulholland Drive did for cinema. I’m not in either camp, but I’m still glad to have been along for the ride.

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