
Zut alors! Splish-splashing its way onto Switch in stunning watercolour is Dordogne, a nostalgic kayak trip down the metaphorical river of life – and also down the literal river of Dordogne in the south of France. Umanimation, the production company behind the game, specialises in “transmedia universes”, its previous works including a web series and a VR short film. This, its first video game project, combines the airy sweeps of gorgeous watercolours with all the button-pressing fun of gaming - and does so to deliver a deeply touching rumination on loss.
The story focuses on Mimi and her paternal grandmother Nora. When Mimi is in her early 30s, Nora passes away leaving behind a letter telling Mimi to visit her old house in the French region of Dordogne. Mimi’s father Fabrice has been feuding with Nora for as long as Mimi can remember. She doesn’t know why, but it dates back to a childhood summer visit to her grandmother’s house. She has hazy, happy memories of the holiday, but also suffers from a mental block. Thus is established an emotive mystery wrapped up in halcyon, sun-drenched memories.
Nora’s visit to the house as an adult serves as the framing device for her reveries about her childhood. The painted scenery makes a three-dimensional space with a combination of 3D models and 2D layers, allowing free-roaming control as you explore. The fixed camera angles as you move from one area to the next have something of the Resident Evil about them – while also of course being a million miles away from that.
As Mimi happens upon certain key objects, she has Proustian madeleine moments that whisk her away to that summer with her grandma. Control then shifts to young Mimi in the early 1980s, reluctantly starting a week’s holiday away from Paris. Needless to say, that reluctance dissolves as she discovers the bucolic delights of a remote old house with a river, a market, and caves to explore.
As 12-year-old Mimi, there is much more to do than in the brief sections as an adult. On top of exploring the house and learning about the lives of Nora and her late husband Édouard, various gadgets and activities are gradually introduced. Each memory plays out as a single day of the holiday, and each day is rounded off by completing a page of a scrapbook. Each page can hold a poem, a photograph, a sound recording, and a sticker. These are collected throughout Mimi's adventures with her grandma – from planting herbs in the garden to paddling down the river for a picnic.

What fascinates about the scrapbook is that you can only choose so many things to go in it each time. During a day, you might only find three stickers out of six that were available, you might choose to take photos of balloons in the sky but not of the river down below, to record one sound but not another. Then, out of what you have collected, you must choose only one of each kind to go in your scrapbook. This required selectivity forces you to leave things behind – choosing one thing means letting another go. Knowing that the memories are either being protected for adult Mimi to recall or left at risk of fading makes these choices all the more poignant.
It is Nora who provides a philosophical mindset to cope with these small losses. Having lost her husband, she comes to let Mimi take over some of his possessions and breathe new life into them. Her lesson is that things have many lives; even as they might slip away from you, their essence isn’t lost. It’s heartwarming, but only in the face of tragedy – tissues at the ready for the dramatic climax of the story. Of course, we wouldn't be so silly as to compare Nora’s beautiful and heartrending passing with the rampant clog-popping of, say, Dark Souls, but it does highlight the wonderful range of this medium that both can say something about death. As a feat of storytelling and poetic expression, Dordogne is a success.

Things do get a little hairier when we get stuck into some of the technicalities of gameplay and design. A liberally-used trope in Dordogne is the touchscreen-inspired interaction model of 'moving a cursor so it looks a bit like the thing the character’s doing'. For example, you might have to hold 'A' to hold a lid of a jar, then curve the joystick up to lift the lid off the jar, then wiggle the joystick to shake the jar, and so on. If it doesn’t already feel old at the start of the game, it will after the umpteenth sliding of a key into a lock like that nose-picking game in WarioWare. To Dordogne’s credit, the instructions for what to do are almost always shown explicitly on the screen, so at least there’s not much fidgeting about working out what is interactive and what isn’t.
Elsewhere, the movement around the world is serviceable but not without its problems. Sometimes, Mimi walks infuriatingly slowly, and that’s occasionally exacerbated by slowdown. We nearly snapped the stick off the Joy-Con trying to drag the little darling along a country lane that felt like quicksand. Some scenes are beset with invisible walls or hotspots that are difficult to identify or hit. It’s not disastrous; it usually doesn’t interfere with the experience, but when it does, it can really destroy the moment. It’s a shame, too, that as the game’s handful of hours pass by, the emphasis shifts to more dynamic interactions, and the cracks in the gameplay start to show.
Conclusion
On its trip down the river, some of Dordogne’s design ideas feel stodgy, performance is sometimes flaky, and it leans into its clunkiest gameplay elements as it nears the end. But to get hung up on these points is to miss a truly touching story bringing a beautiful world to life in sound and images. There’s a lot to reward you here if you can navigate the obstacles and just go with the flow.
Comments 25
This review saw the chance for French and clearly took it wholeheartedly, haha. Sacré bleu, as they say.
I've canoed down the Dordogne and it was a great experience. Not sure whether the game will be as good though. My wife accidentally cracked the canoe shop owner over the head with her oar on the way to the river and then piloted her vessel straight through a low hanging tree. I doubt that made it into the game. I can highly recommend the trip for anyone visiting the area though
Beautiful artwork. I've always been kind of intimidated by watercolour, it's a bit unforgiving as far as painting mediums go. More of an acrylic man myself.
Sounds really interesting actually. Maybe one for the bargain basement purchase. Cheers for the review.
The story in the game is a little too much for me at this current stage in my life. Hopefully I'll be able to play and enjoy it in the future.
Y'a des frainçais ici?
@BingleyBongley Yep, des dordognais même.
OHOHO baguette.

More directly related to this game and review: it looks lovely, on a deep sale I'll pick it up.
And the Wario Ware nose picking boss should get its own full game.
Amazing, picking it up for sure! The art games are right up my alley!
on a sidenote, why do only smaller titles get "repetetive" as a minus, whereas Ghost of Tsushima has 50 copypaste fox holes, not even mentioning Hogwart's Legacy
This sounds more like an 8/10 than a 7. Repetition is given too heavy of a value and its gorgeous strengths are given too little.
Good to know this game has what I'd consider minor issues compared to its positives, in the wishlist it stays as c'est sûr that I'll eventually get it!
@BingleyBongley : un peu mon n'veu, et pas qu'un peu.
@Takoda : not "sacrébleu". "Sacrebleu". No one says this anymore, except for joking or emphasizing a sentence.
@Ulysses I would say visuals are given too heavy a value in games in general and people play them because they're pretty, despite being boring and repetitive. I'm glad this review is here to make me think twice before purchasing.
@ChiffonBurette Je dirais même plus, deux Dordognais.
@NKR I’ve lived a lie. I always thought it was sacré, not sacre. The more you know. Don’t get to use my French that much anymore so it’s a tad rusty and incorrect.
@Dekamaster2 Ah, ça fait plaisir ça !
On a de la chance camarade.
I've been watching this game since 2018 when I saw a tweet about it from even earlier: 2016. https://twitter.com/cedric_babouche/status/782687182700023812
That's around 7 years to make it a reality!
Total respect for Cedric for securing funding, building a team, and seeing his vision through to the end.
It's one thing to look at a game and make a snap decision about it, or play it for a bit and do the same, but it's another thing completely to understand the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into creating a game like this (or any game really). Bravo.
(had to get some French in there)
I hoped for an 8 but I absolutely love watercolor art so I will play it anyway!
@BingleyBongley toutafé
Hmm, I don't really want to deal with the topic of death with my 2 & 4 year olds just yet so I'm very on the fence with this one. Any other parents here who have tried to play this with their young kids? The graphic style seems super charming so I'm tempted to pick it up but don't want to worry my kids about death.
@Takoda Well, we don't say that anymore, that's a pretty old expression
By the way, I'm enjoying this game, it's beautiful, fresh and deep at the same time. It's like a slight breeze on your face...
@ComfyAko Neither of those games are on Switch so not sure this reviewer from a Nintendo focused site is the person to call out for giving a pass to repetitive tasks in those games.
Aside from that, I think you answered your own question. When a game is only a few hours long, doing the same thing 50 times over those few hours is very different than doing the same thing 50 times over 50+ hours. They're also talking specifically about simple actions that you've likely already done in a dozen other games making them repetitive right out of the gate. I think we've all rolled our eyes at the same pipeflow "hacking" minigames that so many games have which rightfully get called out in reviews all the time.
@skullivan I'm referring to all of the current AAA as per the copypaste trend.
Sure, but when a game is only a few hours long, you don't get to do something 50 times, and the few times you do perform a certain activity are usually more diverse and meaningful to the story. I haven't played Dordogne yet, but I assume that is also a case here.
It's just that nobody seems to care when the AAA studios give us games that are literally just 4 activities copied and pasted across an otherwise empty map. Those games deserve no more than 6/10, yet are mostly showered with praise for no reason.
Great review, magnifique
The simple fact that you can play the game in occitan automatically makes it a 10.
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