Phoenix Springs review: a surreal detective mystery that’s both old-school and new wave

Playing Phoenix Springs feels like David Lynch spliced together the ripped pages of a pulpy sci-fi comic with the storyboards of a broody noir. Its visuals are stark and foreboding, its dialogue delivered in riddles, and its haunting choral music sounds like it’s been recorded in a wind tunnel. It’s a point-and-click that calls back to early 90’s Lucas Arts adventure games, and while it shares the same frustrations, the presentation makes it feel entirely contemporary. What begins as a standard detective game – chatting to strangers, rummaging through junk, finding addresses found on the net – soon spirals into something else entirely. I’ve finished it twice and I’m still not sure I totally understand what it all means.

Kickstarted back in 2017, Phoenix Springs has been on quite a journey. It looks totally different from the initial visuals presented on the campaign’s page but for the better. It stays true to its initial premise though. You play as Iris, a reporter looking for her estranged brother. Soon into the investigation, Iris’ detective work takes her to Phoenix Springs, a lush oasis plonked in the middle of a vast desert. As Iris begins to explore this impossible place, she begins to unravel the dark secrets surrounding her brother’s disappearance.

You’ll be sniffing out answers through classic point-and-click detective work. However, instead of a Mary Poppin’s bag of infinite space for objects, you’ll instead collect words for your mental mind map. Clicking the environment will give you clues in the form of words, and you can then use those words in combination with other things in the environment to get even more words. For example, if you wanted to find an author’s book, you would click on the character’s name in your mind map and then click on a bookshelf in the scene, this will give you the titles to their published work. This word soup of places, objects, and people echoes a detective board, but instead of a mess of red string and Sharpie, this mental map is black text on a white background – clean and minimalist. It’s a wonderful combination of old-school and new-wave.

Connecting words to objects in the environment gives you that galaxy-brained buzz of feeling like a true detective, but often solutions can whiplash from satisfaction to frustration. This feels more like a stylistic choice from the developers, than accidental annoyances. Sometimes, though, it’s difficult to distinguish between what feels like awkward missteps or purposeful design. The puzzles at the beginning follow a consistent logic, but as soon as Iris finds the titular Phoenix Springs, the game starts to melt into something more surreal, and this is where the puzzles start to feel disconnected from that logic.

The general vibe of the game doesn’t help in this regard, with minimal audio, and seemingly endless reels of enigmatic dialogue, making it difficult to find your footing if you do get stuck. Thankfully, Calligram Studios has a link to a walkthrough in the game’s menu, but I’d rather the game communicate to me in a way that would better nudge me towards solutions rather than have me resort to a step-by-step guide. I often felt that the game was speaking to me in a language I didn’t understand, which most of the time felt poetic but would slip into fortune cookie levels of ambiguity.

Phoenix Springs is a poetic game in every sense of the word, expressing itself in surreal ways, and often favouring the atmosphere over how it’s played – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Its matte color palette and combination of 2D and 3D make the entire game look like it’s been rotoscoped, and weird angles and dramatic shadows make for a bold first impression. There are some striking visual moments too: a tree ritualistically set ablaze, a group of sleep-deprived ravers dancing in an abandoned university hall, and a strange machine of messy cables and coloured wires that can project a person’s memories onto a screen. It’s wonderful in this regard and certainly one of the most striking games of 2024.

The game’s narration punches up the strangeness. Iris (voiced by Alex Anderson Crow) comments on everything you click on, voices her thoughts, describes what’s in front of her, and even recites what the characters have said. It’s all delivered in a blunt, nihilistic manner, her worldview as stark as the world around her. Her jet-black hair and matter-of-fact attitude make it feel like she’s walked straight out of a Humphrey Bogart flick. Even when the story becomes purposefully murky, she remains hyper-focused, precise, and to the point. Sure, puzzle solutions could be better signalled, but she at least communicates what things might be important, and what might not, by either commenting on your word combinations with some helpful information or completely disregarding your messy guesswork with a curt remark. She’s a woman who gets to the point, and she remains a welcome beacon in a sea of riddled prose and interpretation.

Phoenix Springs feels like a contemporary detective game regardless of its point-and-click work. To dance around spoilers, it’s about birth, rebirth, memories, technology, and ethics. It also possesses a kind of mysticism. You’ll find numbers in rock formations, help a young girl collect her memories, and try to recall the tune a mechanic prophet sang to you. It’s weird, but everything is baked with meaning and open to interpretation. Detective games always operate on a stream of logic and structure – but Phoenix Springs is different. It’s refreshing, if a little rough around the edges.

This isn’t a game to mindlessly consume and it’s not going to give you a boost of tasty brain endorphins. Phoenix Springs is a game that demands you slow down, and whose purposefulness will entice some players but put others off. In this way, it feels like an island, entirely its own thing. I don’t completely understand the story – or at least I think I don’t – but that’s the point. There are some frustrations with its puzzles, but Phoenix Springs has an incredible point of view and it sticks with it wholeheartedly, and that’s something I can respect the hell out of.

This article is based on a review build of the game provided by the publisher.