Déraciné subverts Japanese horror tropes as easily as it conceals the limitations of virtual reality. By casting the player in an active and passive role in its narrative, it juxtaposes agency with accountability as it creates a tranquil, sinister story. Déraciné is a return to FromSoftware practicing their talent inside of darkness, but mercifully away from Souls.
Déraciné is narrative adventure featuring wholesome children, sinister undertones, and a projection of selflessness as the ultimate virtue. Depending on your perception, FromSoftware’s latest work can be either inside or outside of their menacing wheelhouse. The developers of the Souls series have, over the last twenty years, also created a downtempo macabre adventure, paragons of mecha, ostentatious mecha, and wildly ambitious role-playing games. Déraciné retains FromSoftware’s pervasive sense of unease under the blanket of, well, children at a boarding school.
Déraciné opens with the player taking the role of a newly christened faerie. These ethereal beings can pass through the world as it’s in stasis and conduct a limited amount influence with its inhabitants. In the case of Déraciné, the world is a fatigued boarding school and its populace is a group of six presumably orphaned children and their inattentive headmaster. The school seems to be in an extended phase of dawn and dusk where everyone is busying themselves with ordinary problems and wistful observations. It’s all undermined by foreboding orchestral strings and wait-what-the-hell minutia that suggests an uncomfortable malaise is on the horizon.
A faerie in Déraciné is entitled to certain supernatural powers. On one hand is a ring that can draw life out of a living object and restore life to another. In the other is a pocket watch that can warp to different points in time. For the player this manifests as a literal set of two hands, which is the point of interaction in Déraciné’s world. Each Move controller takes the shape of a golden translucent hand, obliging a familiar VR model in service to safe narrative. VR hands are good at grabbing things, which is conveniently all that Déraciné asks.
Movement and structure also obey the accepted “rules” for comfortable VR locomotion. Point-to-point walking, where the player can teleport to several predetermined spots, is favored over fluid and direct motion. Blue travel icons are smaller while larger icons halo around points of direct interest and interaction. This doubles as a way to cut down on the amount of potential exploration, insuring the player’s attention, while of their own volition, is directed toward objects, people, and places with relevance to Déraciné’s narrative.
Faeries only exist in static moments between time. Windows curtains blowing, snowflakes falling, and human beings all stay locked in place while the player moves about the boarding school. Within these instances are either oranges ghosts of the children’s previous actions or the present, static bodies of their current locations. Dialogue and soliloquies of the children are found by reaching out and grabbing sphere of light near their bodies, including hidden spheres only available after interacting with nearby objects. These interconnected sequences are where Déraciné tells most of its conspicuous story.
Divided into a series of related events in separate (but close) epochs, Déraciné positions its player-faerie as an integral part of the children’s lives. In the beginning it’s all simple mischief, like finding hidden vials of herbs and bittering the group’s soupy dinner. As time winds on the kids start wondering if the legends of the faeries are true and if their powers can be used for a higher purpose. Would preventing a broken leg, for example, have made a girl’s life more fulfilling? Would effect would that have on everyone else?
Déraciné plays its tricks in moderation. Time is fluid, but only in a handful of instances. Actions and decisions matter, but revolve around solitary issues without affecting the outside world. The school and its inhabitants feel like they’re part of a blocked off segment of reality. Part of this is due to the turn-of-the-century isolation in the (I’m guessing) British countryside. The remainder is a device used to focus on character and plot with equal attention. Déraciné is less opaque than FromSoftware’s more recent work, but there’s darkness and pain everywhere if you’re willing to look around.
As a game, Déraciné plays somewhere between classic adventure and modern walking simulator. Moving through epochs carries a series of basic demands, usually obliged by, for example, finding everyone’s instrument for a small concert or locating a special stick to open a window. Item inventory isn’t especially large and, assuming you listen intently to each level’s dialogue spheres, it’s not often Déraciné stonewalls progress. It’s an easy adventure game. I did get stuck twice, but only when I didn’t pay enough attention to what a character was saying or carrying.
Backtracking gets a label as busywork, but time spent Déraciné’s school is all in service to its character. It’s intended to take the safety and security of home as a concept and children as beings of pure innocence. Becoming familiar with their environment is as important as judging their character. Different chapters open (and close) rooms in the school, providing incentive for the player to lurk in every corner in ever chapter.
Déraciné is also willing to let players leave a considerable amount of narrative content on the table. When a chapter’s objective puzzle is solved, the player is free to open the pocket watch and move on. Don’t do this. Crucial story features and deeply foreshadowing elements exist outside of the critical path, including some where I couldn’t believe Déraciné would allow the player to skip them.
As I was playing Déraciné I was wondering why it was in virtual reality. Moving from room to room and engaging in relatively simple puzzle sequences seemed suitable for a non-VR game of Déraciné’s scope. It was, for lack of a better word, mundane in its medium. What I realized after I was finished, however, was that may have been the point. Déraciné places the player in the world both actively and passively, guarding when they can be an agent or a witness. Like the faerie they’re playing, they are not the main character and the world isn’t under their control.
Déraciné never heaves surprises onto the player, instead opting for a slow burn of story and plotting. When it shows its hand it can feel absolutely terrifying. After it normalizes children whom are basically self-sufficient, when there’s an absence of a particular character, and the nature of their presence at the school is all called into question, Déraciné unloads its reasons and revelations. It’s easy to figure out what happened. Satisfaction is found in learning why.
It’s an odd comparison, but Déraciné’s place in virtual reality feels close to what Atlus did with Catherine during the last hardware generation. FromSoftware is flexing unused muscles while feeling out newer hardware. In Catherine’s case everyone took it as a preamble for Persona 5. Déraciné carries a better standalone sense of progression and accomplishment. FromSoftware is capable of and clearly aching to move beyond Souls games. If Déraciné is any indication, they’re well on their way to a number of hopeful futures.
