Each automaton, no matter how complex or what it’s doing, is actually a piece of music, and there’s our first hint that we’ve got a Phantom in the works. The cylinder turns, usually by being cranked and then winding with a spring, and each tiny nub on the cylinder pings a different note on the metal comb, each of which plays a different note. Here's an old-fashioned music box mechanism for comparison: They use a similar mechanism to old-fashioned music boxes, where a piece of music is written and then modeled with different lengths of musical pins and combs that play the notes when the machine is turned on and moving. It’s also stated up front that the automatons run on music. (Do you see this creepy picture of a 17th-century Voralberg with his sleeping, child-like creation? That's this game, all the time, FOREVER.) The fact that the game goes out of its way to talk extensively to the player about how they’re designed and built made me think we might make some, but that didn’t actually happen (although there will be plenty of robot-tinkering, believe you me). The town not only has most of its residents employed at the factory - or did, because when the game starts it’s closed down and the town is dying - but also seems to have its economy and basic functions almost exclusively built around automatons. Kate is in a very real way a stranger dropped into a fantastic and bizarre world, because the game is about to give us a giant infodump of background on the setting, and it’s wild.īasically, this is the fictional town of Valadilene (its name is intentionally ambiguous it could be pretty much anywhere in continental Europe, although the scenery is reminiscent of France or Switzerland to me) and it is almost entirely based around the Voralberg factory, which exclusively makes automatons - humanoid and zoomorphic machines that act like they’re alive and do various tasks. So Kate is a lawyer from New York representing a firm that is negotiating the sale of a local bespoke automated toy factory to a large toy company, and she’s here because she needs to get the owner to sign the finalized contract and apparently the locals don’t believe in fax machines. It’s a little confusing if you weren’t ready for it, especially since your character doesn’t have the excuse of amnesia or a similar problem that some games use to explain why you have no idea what’s happening and the opening cut scene is the opposite of enlightening, but it’s more immersive and gets the player accustomed to the game’s method of providing information.
The game sets itself up in almost the opposite of the usual adventure game way: where most games give you a quick recap of What’s Going On or The Story So Far and then drop you into the game to explore, this one gives you absolutely no clue what’s happening at all and then has the first chapter heavily exposit at you whenever you look at anything.
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