The Chimerist

I fell in love with Desi Leaves Town in spite of myself, and then fell out of love with it. It’s an app that tumbles through the awkward triangular space between novel, film and game. It doesn’t really work, but the reasons why are interesting.

Desi Leaves Town tells the story of a rich, jaded Parisian aesthete who shuts himself up in a suburban villa to escape the world he despises and to pursue various peculiar lifestyle and design choices. It’s based (loosely) on an 1884 novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans. However, the protagonist has been changed into a giant cravat-wearing frog, which alleviates much of the ridiculous (and, I have to say, very French) grandiosity of his carryings-on. Desi pursues elaborate and eccentric design schemes (buying a tortoise to set off the colors in his rug, then deciding to have the animal’s shell gilded and encrusted with gems), and then mopes around after he gets tired of them. That’s the extent of the plot.

At least as far as I can tell. The story is told by a series of short animated films alternating with basic puzzle games. The interactivity is all in the games, which did not much bother me. I was enchanted by the artwork (by Jakob Haglof) to the degree that I was willing to set aside my usual literary Francophobia. Desi, who would have been insufferably tedious as a human being, was much easier to take as a cartoon amphibian, sort of like Mr. Toad if he’d falling under the influence of Oscar Wilde. As befits the visual realization of a book about a person obsessed with color, the palette of Desi Leaves Town was so voluptuously saturated, its use of patterns and contrasting hues so bold, I felt happy just to stare at it.

However, I got stuck on one of the puzzles and could go no further. This was frustrating. Some of the puzzles were too rudimentary to be fun, but could be quickly gotten through. Others were challenging enough to hold my interest. My stumbling block, however, involved flipping exactly the right configurations of switches on a perfume machine, and it proved to be simultaneously difficult and boring. For reasons unknown to god and man, there is no “skip” option, and so I had to jettison the whole thing. By then, I cared – just a smidgeon – about Desi’s fate, but not enough to slog through all those lever combos. Instead of the interactivity opening up new experiences, it imprisoned me in a dead end.

Desi Leaves Town exemplifies how difficult it is to integrate narrative with games; each interferes with the other rather than advancing it. I’ve played puzzle games where I sat impatiently through the attempts to impose a “story,” but this is the first case in which I would happily have dispensed with all the puzzles to see what happened. 

“See” is the operative word. Puzzles that were uniformly elementary but fully as ravishing as the rest of the app would have been welcome. If they were clever or inventive, better yet, but in that case I probably would have lost interest in the story. The fact that I enjoyed it as much as I did suggests that I’m more easily swayed by eye candy than I’d like to believe.

–Laura Miller