The Fernweh Saga: Book One
EXT. HIGHWAY - EVENING - AERIAL VIEW. Ominous music plays as a lone car follows the curves of the road through a vast dark forest.
Okay, The Fernweh Saga isn’t a film, so it actually opens inside the car, with a love ballad playing over the radio between fits of static. But when the car breaks down just outside of the tiny municipality of Fernweh, the stage couldn’t be more perfectly set for a tale of small-town spookiness. The setup is so perfect it might be almost cozy … if it weren’t so eerie.
You were born in Fernweh and spent your childhood there, but you haven’t been back since your early teens, when your parents died and your grandfather sent you away. Now that your grandfather is dead, it falls to you to settle his affairs. You and your friend B (Beckett or Becca; as with all of the potential love interests, their gender is determined by the player), who comes along for moral support, intended to stay only a day or two, but the mechanic says it will be nearly a week before your car is ready. At first, it’s not so bad. The bed and breakfast where you’re staying is now under the management of your onetime neighbor and playmate S (Silas or Sofia) and their mother. When your agenda requires you to drop by the police station, you discover your childhood best friend J (James or Jane) works there as a detective. Even your old rival R (Reese or Ruby), the scion of Fernweh’s most prominent family, is still there, and they’ve grown up rather charming, especially if you like style and swagger. But there’s more to Fernweh than happy reunions: J wants to meet with you away from the station to discuss the circumstances of your grandfather’s death, not all of which made it into the official report. A distraught father shows up at a memorial event for your grandfather to report his teenage son missing. Soon you and your friends, both old and new, are joining midnight search parties, meeting in the diner for strategy sessions, and putting the key ring your grandfather left you to good use as you delve into the secrets of the man you once believed you knew.
It was inevitable that the first (and so far only) volume of Aelsa Trevelyan’s Fernweh Saga would remind me of nothing so much as Jim Dattilo’s Out for Blood, but although the similarities are undeniable (from a protagonist whose car breaks down just outside the small town to which they’re returning after the death of an estranged grandfather, to an organized search for a missing teenage boy), Fernweh is much more tauntingly enigmatic. Likewise, the wooded setting, eccentric townsfolk, and hints of layered secrets will feel familiarly uncanny to fans of Twin Peaks (and there’s a certain extended dream sequence halfway through that’s so Lynchian I could almost hear some unwritten Badalamenti composition droning in the background), but ultimately Fernweh is sui generis. Every time I thought I was starting to understand what was really going on, I was mostly wrong. Since this is intended as a series opener, Trevelyan doesn’t clear up the mystery in the end - there are answers, but they raise more questions than they resolve - but whatever is going on in Fernweh is legitimately spooky and downright weird.
Relationships with other characters are a major aspect of Fernweh, although I found them less satisfying than the mystery elements. All four of the PC’s frequent companions can be romanced, and J and R can be romanced as a throuple, but it’s all slow-burn so far, at least on the route I played. That’s not a problem in itself - the PC has known most of these characters as adults for all of a week, and I prefer romance that takes time to develop. Unfortunately, much of the space that could be devoted to developing the ROs as complex and interesting characters goes instead to awkward exchanges and either endlessly looking at each other or studiously avoiding eye contact, often in monumentally inappropriate situations. (There’s a reason the way the body responds to threats isn’t called the fight-or-flirt response.) But although the characters were less developed than I would have preferred, they were pleasant enough, with moments of genuinely winsome banter, and I hope they’ll become more compelling as the series continues.
What disappointed me most about Fernweh was the quality of the writing. It’s not awful - Trevelyan even manages a nifty turn of phrase here and there - but it’s very amateurish. Although it’s written in second person, the narration frequently touches upon what other people are thinking or feeling that the PC couldn’t directly know, breaking the immersion of the limited perspective. Trevelyan has a tendency to overexplain, not only in the sense of telling rather than showing, but also in ways that rather insult the reader’s intelligence. She delves into such mysteries as why people drink coffee in the morning; why a medical office that handles corpses might have a utilitarian interior even if the reception area decor is a little more creative; and why a person might ask a friend they saw suffer a severe injury the previous evening, who is now walking around with a heavily bandaged arm, how they’re feeling today. As for the copyediting … it seems, based on a note at the end of the game, to have been done by a personal friend of the author’s, and I don’t want to be unkind, so I’ll just say that I hope Hosted Games insists on hiring a professional when Book Two comes out.
But for all the room there is here for improvement, when Book Two is finished I’ll be buying it not merely as a HG completionist or even as a self-appointed ChoiceScript game reviewer, but as a fan. I want more Fernweh. I want to uncover the town’s secrets, to explore corners I haven’t yet, to find what exactly is going on in the woods, why there’s a server at the diner who’s creepily fascinated with my character, to understand why the [redacted] [redacted] in the end when I tried to [redacted], which actually didn’t surprise me that much because [redacted].
If you’re looking for a spooky story that will leave you haunted, shaking your fist at that cliffhanger but hungry for more, The Fernweh Saga: Book One delivers.