Trüberbrook
Tiny handcrafted film sets pull focus to this charming mystery tale
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Up close, Bild Und Tonfabrik’s miniature world is a marvel. Well, town – the rural locale of Trüberbrook is small but exquisitely formed, every tree, rock and building hand-crafted from real materials and scanned into digital existence. The result is a wonderfully uncanny setting that looks halfreal, 3D models made to look almost 2D with flat compositions cast in limpid, golden light. If Wes Anderson made a videogame, it’d probably look something like this.
Twin Peaks is the other obvious point of reference for this point-and-click adventure, which casts you as a young American physicist who’s won a mini-break in the strange town of Trüberbrook (despite his inability to recall ever entering a competition). Like Dale Cooper, Hans Tannhauser chatters to an absent woman by way of a tape recorder. And, like the town of Twin Peaks, there’s something decidedly fishy about this rural German village.
The eerie mystery unfolding behind the scenes, and the tangible handmade textures within them, invite poking and prodding as all good adventure games should. We feel compelled to peer at each faded poster, and marvel at the array of bizarrely titled meats in the window of the local Delikatessen – despite the fact that Tannhauser’s commentary often veers into the inane, and our cursor to places unbidden when using the imprecise gamepad controls. The residents of Trüberbrook, too, prompt curiosity, such as the hotel concierge, whose body stretches up from behind the front desk like a concertina playing itself, and a fellow guest who immediately voices a suspicion that something’s not quite right with time and space in this town.
Yes, our demo of Trüberbrook is often a little too on the nose. But the noses are so characterful that it’s easy to forgive. After a ghostly visitor makes off with Tannhauser’s precious research paper – we’d question the veracity of him bringing his work with him on holiday, but hey, we find it hard to switch off too – we hunt for it in some of the town’s less tourist-facing areas. Not that they’re any less lavish in their attention to detail. An underground facility might be utilitarian, but is still a visual delight, the gentle rotation of an orrery framing the scene, the forest of tiny wires sprouting from a bank of machines prompting concern for the developer’s setbuilders’ eyesight and general mental condition.
The facility introduces some light puzzlesolving. After a doorway refuses to grant us access to the next floor, citing “memory overflow”, we scan the room for a chunk of RAM to plug into a waiting machine. Doing so summons the station guardian, and our second challenge: talking it into an existential crisis. Dialogue options allow us to challenge its
programming and point out logical fallacies – overheating its processors, which we then vent to gain its trust – and strike up a friendship that convinces the AI to let us progress.
It’s a mildly amusing tableau, in spite of the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a fail-state or any meaningful choice to the interaction beyond the order in which we select responses. But we honestly feel a bit guilty about our manipulation of the (oddly human) station guardian. Trüberbrook’s story will attempt to tackle the theme of friendship in its many facets, we’re told, including the ways in which it can be nurtured and exploited.
Where exactly all this leads, and how it will tie into the supernatural mystery pervading the tired little town, is unknown. So, too, is whether the bigger picture will prove as elegant as the minutiae. The scenery is accomplished artistry, but its handcrafted nature means there’s a limit of 30 unique backgrounds, and that exploration of the town may boil down to multiple visits to the same limited handful. Then again, there’s an atmosphere of familiarity to the quaint Trüberbrook that is spookily hard to resist – and will doubtless provide an excellent emotional foil when things start getting even weirder.