Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
If you have an open-mind and an appreciation for sci-fi love stories,
terse conversations, and smokey cafés, have I got the game for you
this week. In case the world of Proteus wasn't quite interactive (or visually realistic) enough for your tastes, you may want to take a look at Bientôt l'été from Tales of Tales, another artistic game experience for both Windows and OS X (with a free browser-based demo) that's received a lot of buzz since its release a few weeks ago. If you're unfamiliar, Bientôt l'été (Bee-ehn-toe lay-tay) is French for "it's nearly summer", and while the game features lots of atmospheric French voice acting, the text is all available in multiple languages.
In some ways it reminds me a bit of the multiplayer aspect of Journey, another incredibly evocative and abstract game. Even though the games themselves are quite different, both present you with deceptively simple exploration and blinding visuals at first, but it becomes more about how it makes you feel and how it makes you interact indirectly with your partner on the other end--who is a real person, somewhere, playing the game just like you.
For now, let's start at the beginning: