Phoenix Springs is a point-and-click adventure game, set in a mysterious neo-noir world that feels like it could be a near future. It’s the debut game from Calligram Studio, a team of three people between the UK and France. They call themselves an art collective rather than a development studio, which in any other situation might come off as pretentious. However, this team is well prepared to back up their claims of thinking about the medium of computer games differently. A near-future, mysterious point-and-click adventure game may seem like nothing new on the surface. But despite being made of familiar pieces, Phoenix Springs delivers one of the most compelling, intriguing, and artistically stunning gaming experiences of 2024.

You play as Iris, a reporter who is searching for the truth about her brother Leo. Her search leads her to the titular Phoenix Springs – a strange, utopian-seeming oasis in the middle of the desert, an impossible natural paradise where no one has a name, only a role to fill. It’s enshrouded in mystery before you even arrive there, and once you do it’s clear that something is very, very wrong. It’s up to Iris, drawing on her years of experience, to figure out the mystery that lies at the heart of this oasis – and how her brother fits into the equation.

Meticulous and Gorgeous

I have never played a game that looks like Phoenix Springs. It uses a blend of toon-shaded 3D, digital illustrations, and hand-drawn animations to create a style that feels like you’re stepping into an art gallery. Or perhaps an animated film is the better analogy, given how careful this game is with its framing. From start to finish, the entire experience is cinematic – as you move around the world, all the camera angles feel deliberate, set up to create feelings of wonderment, overwhelm, and isolation. The colour palette is kept minimal, with never more than a few tones selected for each screen – giving each of the locations a distinct feeling and allowing the game to draw your attention using highlighted objects. The game avoids any loading screens, and in doing so is able to propel you through scenes with a momentum not often found in the genre. Every single aspect of this game’s presentation feels deliberate and meticulously crafted in service of the bigger picture.

The sound design here is absolutely superb as well. Every single one of the sound effects feels textured, deep and immersive. Iris’ footsteps as they wander through the world blend in and out of the ambient sound, and the audio of each scene blends seamlessly with the next. The technology in the world feels old and laboured, thanks in no small part to the groaning creaks of automated trains and the whirring of terminal monitors. Iris’ voice sounds compressed, like it’s been recorded onto a tape and played back. And the original score is beautiful and atmospheric, hitting all the right notes to elevate Phoenix Springs into an immersive masterpiece. I felt the world around me melt away completely as I wandered through screens of streets, abandoned universities, deserts and mysterious oases.

The game is fully voice-acted, but it has a trick up its sleeve – the only voice in the game is Iris’. Every observation about the world and all dialogue with other characters is told through her voice as if we are listening back to voice notes she’s taken during her investigation. Not only is this a clever way to frame the story – she is a reporter, after all – but it also allows the writers to take artistic liberties with every single line. Iris is reserved with her words, speaking in her own kind of shorthand. We get hints about the larger world from her observations – examining an old bookshelf she remarks that most of these books must be forbidden by now; examining streetlights in the dark she notes that no energy curfew means this must be a wealthy neighbourhood. We learn just as much about Iris as we do about the world through her observations.

Leading You Along

Instead of the usual inventory system that is almost synonymous with the point-and-click genre, in Phoenix Springs you don’t collect any physical items at all. Here, your inventory exists solely in the protagonist’s head, in the form of leads. As you progress through the game, you’ll discover more and more leads from talking to people and examining objects in the world. These leads can then be combined with objects, or asked to people, which can reveal more leads in turn. Early in the game, you get told your brother enrolled at a local university – but the old man who tells you can’t remember what it was called. Some three-letter acronym, he says. This unlocks the ‘University’ lead. Nearby, there’s an orphan who tries to sell you scavenged objects from your brother’s old house, including a bundle of pens with the letters ULS on them. You combine the ‘University’ lead with the pens to intuit that ULS might be the name of a nearby university, and is worth investigating. That gives you the ‘ULS’ lead, which you can then ask the old man about.

The game is a cycle of unlocking these new leads and finding the right place to use them. But not every lead you’re given will be useful – the game also throws you red herrings and dead ends. That could have made the experience very frustrating very quickly, but Phoenix Springs handles these in some clever ways. As you progress through the game, leads that are no longer relevant to you get greyed out in your inventory – indicating that you don’t need to worry about them anymore, but leaving them there as a reminder of what you found. Each of those dead-end leads also reveals something new about the world, so you never feel like you’ve wasted your time. By the end of the game, you have a sprawling map of observations, leads, and revelations that remind you of how you got where you are. I absolutely adore this system. It transforms the point-and-click experience in subtle ways that feel much more like you’re solving a mystery than collecting and using items. At any point, you can combine an active lead with Iris to remember it, and she’ll remind you of where it was found or what it means. This can be very important, as Phoenix Springs isn’t afraid to throw you in the deep end right away, and then keep pushing you progressively deeper and deeper.

Following The Trail

You’re immediately thrown into the action at the start of the game, your only clue being that you need to find your brother, Leo Dormer. As you progress, you are constantly being drip-fed just enough information to keep you on the trail, to find the next clue, to figure out the next step. Phoenix Springs does an almost unbelievable job at this. It somehow keeps throwing you into more and more complicated situations, with next to no guidance, but you’ve always got just enough information to get through. Every time I was about to get frustrated that I didn’t know what to do, I would stumble across something that gave me an idea. This is the biggest strength of this entire experience – the game trusts you to put the pieces together, in the puzzles and in the story.

Putting It Together

Just as with the world-building, Phoenix Springs’ story doesn’t waste any time on exposition or explaining things to you – it trusts you to put the pieces together. Throughout its three acts, it carefully unfolds the story to you, in flashes and off-hand comments and shocking revelations. Layer by layer, the game reveals a tale of scientific ambitions, of the fallibility of memory and the torture of losing it. As the credits rolled my mind was still racing, putting together the final pieces of what I had just experienced. In refusing to hold your hand and explain every twist to you, Phoenix Springs gives you the thrilling moments of connecting the dots yourself.

In pulling off that herculean task, this game manages to be more than the sum of its parts. It threads the needle of making you feel like you’re in over your head, yet giving you just enough to go on. It propels you through its narrative with enough momentum that I could barely put it down. It immerses you with its gorgeous design and presentation, so much so that even when you’re stuck on a puzzle, the look and feel alone is enough to pull you through. And finally, it leaves you with unanswered questions that are exciting rather than frustrating, themes to ruminate on and mysteries to figure out.

Calligram Studio call themselves an art collective rather than a development studio, and after playing this game, I’m inclined to agree.