Very Retrouvaille

Very Retrouvaille (from the French "retrouvailles," the feeling of joy when reuniting with someone) is a retro (retrou?) RPG romp about a little girl looking for her runaway pet rabbit with the help of her neighborhood friends. It's a take on the long in the tooth formula of coercing a difficult mayor into letting you past the town gatekeeper and into the incredibly dangerous™ forest/castle/meadow/minimall, rather than, of course, finding an alternate route or explaining the situation, and so our heroine Faraday Ram must canvass the town on a series of fetch quests, coaxing apple pies, wooden stools, and used postcards out of the locals before reaching the next major plot beat.

Retrouvaille, by prince, is the product of about two weeks' work, designed with a Famicom aesthetic in mind and original graphics, and saddled with a 100% Kevin MacLeod soundtrack. Unfortunately while the SNES era influence inspires cute sprtework and a lovely green palette, the game also inherits an unintended retro game clunkiness, like the inventory that lists off your items in the style of an answering machine, the unlockable pages which accumulate in the library seemingly at random, and the music room which appears bizarrely in-game and only during the climax.



This, along with the play style, which is like the more tedious parts of Animal Crossing, makes Very Retrouvaille sort of a frustrating experience. Eventually, I get tired of wandering the same three areas yet again counting mailboxes and picking up music sheets. Granted, I was tired and am dumb, but when given a farsighted and deceptively simple goal (enter forest, look for rabbit) which gets constantly interrupted in a series of increasingly pointless trivialities, it's hard to take any interest in the daily ins and outs of who in the village is dating who and what is the latest gossip and which one likes apples, or as it were, it's difficult to see the forest for the trees (pun intended). The characters are obstacles more than they are means of strengthening a canon, and the expectedly sad ending is done so ambiguously by contrast that you'll almost wish the game was about strengthening friendships and had no overarching plot.

Others may extol the cutesy aesthetic or the apt soundtrack selection, but I am grouchier than other people and in any case choosing songs to fit pictures is not a talent.