Mystery point-and-click adventure Phoenix Springs tells an experimental story with traditional puzzle mechanics

Dayten Rose, 9 December 2024

Among the trailers shown at Summer Game Fest this year, one instantly commanded attention. It began with a slow zoom of a woman clutching a photograph to her chest, rendered in stark white against cadmium yellow and simple green shapes like flora. Colors shift with a painterly texture as a stark voice narrates, “Here is what I learned during my years as a reporter.”

The trailer (linked below) is boldly evocative and leaves the viewer with one lasting question: what the hell is going on here? Even now having completed Phoenix Springs, I don’t really have a straight answer, but for all that it has to say about memory and mortality, its most interesting relationship is the one created between its blurry, surreal narrative and straightforward point-and-click mechanics.

Phoenix Springs puts the player in the role of Iris, a seasoned tech reporter in a world where technology is dominant. Worldbuilding is purposefully light, but sleep deprivation raves, bioethics debates, and scattered stasis pods suggest a future not too distant from our own. Iris’s reporting chops are realized in the game’s core inventory mechanic. Rather than collecting items like in a traditional point-and-click adventure, you collect leads in the form of words and concepts, which you can connect to objects and people in the world. Your interactions, including the words of other characters, are expressed through Iris’s flat, factual narration and occasional cutscenes.

This conceptual inventory is innovative in the context of a point-and-click adventure, although I found it familiar as a fan of the Golden Idol games. But whereas those games—or as an even better example, the recently released puzzler Great God Grove—ask you to reinterpret and repurpose the snippets of language in your collection, Phoenix Springs staunchly plays them straight down the middle. Names always refer to people, book titles always recall the books themselves - everything in your inventory is exactly as it appears.

Heavily inspired by the novel Zero K, about a cryogenic preservation facility in the desert, Phoenix Springs explores the consequences of unnaturally extending one’s lifespan.

The biggest element that separates Phoenix Springs from other puzzle games in the point-and-click genre is its commitment to the idea of space (literal space, metaphorical space - the works). The challenge of many puzzle adventure games is to extract solutions from clutter (which when done poorly can lead to pixel hunting). Phoenix Springs’ major distinction from other games in the genre is its visual commitment to empty space. Scenes are rendered as monochromatic expanses, background and foreground are sometimes difficult to separate, and certain locations are mirrored in watery reflections where it’s unclear where the landscape ends and the illusion begins.

Expanse is also a primary narrative theme. Iris’s search for her brother takes her to the desert oasis of Phoenix Springs, where most of the gameplay consists of wandering through empty screens. Denizens of the oasis are scattered throughout, all busily consumed in some task or another—petting a shrub to help it flower or taking their own pulse—while seemingly incapable of explaining what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. Their identities, too, are left empty.

Many of the puzzles in Phoenix Springs involve helping these people reclaim their memories, they are blank slates ready to be filled in. Puzzles involve reminding someone of something - from this life or perhaps another life they once had. Memory is one of the ways the game explores this topic, the very first thing you're asked to do in the game is remember.

Mnemonic themes pair naturally with Phoenix Springs’ conceptual inventory, but the intersection between narrative and mechanics goes woefully unexplored. I usually knew precisely which puzzle was solved by which lead. When I didn’t, I ran between locations trying everything on everyone, and as each character was so isolated I found it impossible to predict who would have the information I needed. The resulting gameplay fell into one of the pitfalls of traditional point-and-click. Pixel hunting, just more spread out.

Once I solved a puzzle, the corresponding lead would turn from a bold black to a faded grey in Iris' mental inventory as she pushed it to the back of her mind. Certain leads were forgotten, only to be recalled later as they became relevant. I imagined this would open the door for interplay between Iris’s memory and my own, but these moments were neither subversive nor particularly consequential.

Where memory does factor into gameplay, it’s anticlimactic. The in-game hint menu cryptically advises you to “remember to remember,” which is further repeated by a character near the end of the game. It fits in nicely with the opaque musings of the locals, but you’d be mistaken if you read it too deeply: it’s a straightforward gameplay hint to the player, telling you to use a certain lead on Iris for her to commit it to memory. This mechanic doesn’t appear elsewhere and serves merely as an intermediary step in a random puzzle sequence.

In exploring a lofty concept, Phoenix Springs' narrative and art style do all the heavy lifting. If a beautiful scene can inspire you to sit and ponder a line of dialogue even though you know it has no bearing on your current objective, then you might not share my frustration with Phoenix Springs' untapped potential.

For me, games excel when they evoke a particular state of mind. Puzzle games generally induce the player to seek order in chaos, and point-and-click puzzlers portray that order as a narrow path. As experimental as Phoenix Springs’ narrative becomes, it remains married to this traditional format, imposing narrowness onto its conceptually expansive themes.

Iris continues in the trailer, “Not every door opens with a key. You can be creative when you connect the dots.” But her search, as the player experiences it, consists entirely of gorgeous doors and disguised keys. The game’s official walkthrough lists the step-by-step sequence of dots to connect, and whenever these dots and lines are connected it's not the result of the player being creative, but a sequence laid out by the game. Phoenix Springs still impresses me, but I ultimately felt like I was interfering with a piece of work that seemed at odds with itself.