The "box art" of this game along with the fact it's set in the 1920s is what drew me to Draugen. It promised to be a sorta spooky mytery game set in rural Norway.

Right at the main menu you get hit with the rather well done music for this game. There's some vocal pieces, but most are all instrumentals. The music is the typical music you'd expect to hear from Scandinavia and helps place you in the setting. This is one thing I love about these little indie games, they usually have killer soundtracks.

The town you explore, while rather small, is beautifully created. It's set on the side of mountainous cliffs with a river, or fjord, on it's opposite side. With the mix of the fog rolling off the water and the trees in the middle of Autumn, you get some really scenic visual. The houses also have that rustic, Norwegian look, save for the house you stay in which looks like a turn of the century American farm house. As this is a walking simulator, you don't get to meet any of the people living in this charming village, well...

Anyways, you play as Edward Harden, an American biologist who travels to Graavik Norway with his young ward, Alice to find his missing sister. Harden is a humorless man who is probably not a hit at parties. Alice on the other hand is a bubly, overly energetic 17 year old who doesn't stop talking. The writer for this Piper looking girl seems to have had the goal of shoving as much 1920s slang in one sentence, damn the consequences. She constantly calls Harden "old bean", so much it stops being fun and becomes annoying. It does simmer down a bit later on, but that may be because I just got indoctrinated to her incessant talking.

Onto the story and as such there will be a lot of spoilers in this section as it's hard to talk about a walking simulator without in-depth story analysis, skip to "All in all" to avoid them. Again, Harden has come to Norway to find his sister Betty, which he seems to have been searching for her for some time. We start in a boat with some really forced exposition from our two main characters explaining all this. Once you roll onto the shores of Graavik you realize there's no one there to greet you and the village has an eerie stillness to it. Going to the house of the family that is to shelter you shows you that there is no one home there either, so you help yourself in and sleep on the sofa.

After a spooky dream where you see your sister standing outside the window in the rain and chase her through the town, you explore the obviously abandoned town for a few days. Each day you find a piece of Betty's clothing, which Alice remarks "Really, that's her hat?" which starts to build some foreshadowing. You learn of some falling out between the man of the house you reside in and his brother who ran the town's mine and it turned the town against each other. Then, only a month before your arrival the children of both brothers are killed, but there is some ambiguity as to whether your host's daughter, Ruth, was murdered or a victim of an accident. Alice wants to find out the truth to put Ruth's spirit at ease, but Harden stubbornly insists on finding Betty. One day you hear a church bell ringing only to find the church boarded up and empty.

Here is where we get a plot twist, turns out that Alice isn't real, but is more of Harden's imaginary friend, there is also a Dr. Who angel he imagines that only shows up when he's being a particularly dense asshole. With this revelation, it does give Alice's constant "Teddy boy" and "old bean" remarks a new context, almost a bit sinister. You come across some fresh graves and find a man who hung himself outside the church. Now I assume he was the last man alive and after burying everyone he hung himself, hence why you don't find dead bodies strewn all over the town. Harden still wants to find his sister, who from the beginning I had serious doubts we were going to find her alive, and after an argument with Alice, she leaves him on his own to search. He decides that Betty was likely investigating the mine, the artifacts they dug up, and the disaster. This is a spooky thriller game so of course if there's an abandoned mine you can bet we'll be exploring it. It actually isn't that deep a mine, nor as spooky as I expected, but they do have one jumpscare in there.

The big ending twist is that the sister you've been searching for actually died when she was a baby and the picture you clung to is actually one from an actress signed for Edward. It's a neat twist and with the veil broken, Harden can see the clothes he's been collecting assuming they were Betty's are actually just tattered old clothes from the locals. Alice comes back and comforts Harden who seems to have these mental breaks where he thinks his sister is alive again and sets out after her.

There seem to be two big themes Draugen tries to dive into. In regards to the town there's the notion of self-fullfiling prophecies and curses. So here's my take on what happened. The mine digs up some Viking artifacts, which they keep hush-hush for fear of being closed down to become an archaeology dig site. The disaster that killed three men was staged to kill them as they were the ones that unearthed the artifacts and all was good until Ruth discovered them one day. I do think her death was an accident, but the town, now learning of the past events, turns on the brother that owns the mine and lynch his son as being responsible for Ruth's death. They then begin to believe they are all cursed. The lore of the Draugen is mentioned, but it doesn't really come up. I was expecting to come across the Draugen, either real or imaginary, but no.

As for with Harden, there is a theme of how people deal with voluntary isolation and what is real. He doesn't seem to be very sociable due to the scarring incident of finding his baby sister who had accidentally drowned and his mother blaming him for it. I think Alice was created as a coping mechanism. She is the fun, sociable person Harden wishes he could be, while the angel is the guiding force that lays down the law in a caring way, unlike his harsh mother. Harden also claims to be an atheist, and I think the angel is his suppressed religious beliefs manifesting. Both Alice and the angel insist they are real to Harden, and there's hints at the debate of what is reality. If Harden believes they are real are they not really real? He doesn't socialize much, apparently spending his time out in nature studying it.

The game gives you just enough info on all these issues to let you draw your own conclusion, but not enough that their feels like there is a definite "right" answer. This is also a very short game with only a few locations that get explored. Versus other walking simulators like Kona that gives you lots of info, this one feels a bit lacking. It does take on these issues, but never feels like it gives itself enough time needed to really build up the cases for them. I would've preferred to be able to explore more of the villagers' houses and learn about their stories and how it related to the greater community.

All in all, this is an okay game. The writing can be a bit forced with the exposition, the characters can grate on you, there's not a lot to explore, and the game ends too quickly, but there's still something here to experience, for a sale price though. The credits hint there will be a sequel, but I don't know how well that could do. This game was very much about Harden and his search for a long dead sister, with that curtain already pulled back and knowing he's an unreliable witness, it will be hard for a sequel to make any sort of good suspense or mystery.