Game: Threefold Recital
Genre: Visual Novel, Indie, Narrative Adventure,
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Everscape Games | indienova
Controller Support: Yes
Steam Deck: Playable
Price: US $13.49 | UK £11.51 | EU € 13,49
Release Date: January 14th, 2025
A review code was provided, and many thanks to JFGames PR.
Threefold Recital is an interesting game to describe. It has visual novel elements. It offers a tangled mystery for you to investigate. It has multiple protagonists, each with a different ability, a la Blizzard’s The Lost Vikings. It has some mild platforming and exploration. It even has collectables in between chapters. Possibly, the closest I can get is “Three furry Ace Attorneys in China explore an alternate vision of Blacksad with some King’s Quest stuff going on.” It makes it sound like there’s a lot going on here, which there is. But it’s also fun, so bear with me.
Attuned to Chinese philosophy, myth, and history, its three leads, a fox, a snake, and a wolf, help originate a world of beastlings, people who live alongside humans. It’s a world full of spirituality and paper lantern-lit cyberpunk, where there are heated arguments over whether there were nine sacred dragon emperors or ten. That starts to get important as the mystery at the heart of this game tangles ever tighter together. And yet, there are puns and gags galore to keep it cheerful. So, how does it review? Let’s start with the fact that I’m unusually delighted with what’s going on here.
Threefold Recital Relies on Entwined Karma
Beginning the game plops you in a helpful yet obscure tutorial; you’ll take over each of the three protagonists in turn, using their special abilities to collect a set of statuettes on the way to some funky machine while learning some odd lore about their land, Bluescales, and their past emperors. It’s a little odd, but it’s also just intriguing enough to get you to push on through the little interstitial area and begin the first chapter with the Buddhist wolf-monk Triratna.
Triratna is mostly just a big, lovable goofball, but he can also see the way karma connects all things. When he gets in over his head after waking up from a bad night of misadventure, that’s a helpful ability to have. It’s also, briefly, the hardest to get used to. Using their special gifts when they’re called for are minigames, and Triratna’s might be the hardest, depending on how you’re controlling the game. You have to cut karma in the right way while the visualized entangled ropes are moving around.
Failure here costs nothing but a little do-over, and the only bit of minor warning I have to offer is that there is a very fuzzy, shadowy outline of a big spider in the background. You know, karmic webs. It’s really not bad for arachnophobes, so long as you know it’s coming.
Continuing on With Alchemy and Art
One of our other two protagonists is Taiqing, a little fox who’s also a priest-alchemist (it’s not like being a monk; Taiqing is more like a xianxia cultivationist, which is a term cozy gamers might’ve learned from Immortal Life, a uniquely spiritual riff on Stardew Valley. His potions and constant scrabble for money are a slow search for immortality and greater spiritual power). But he’s also an eager nerd who thinks he’s going to be the next Sherlock, not just a Watson — literally, as it happens.
Like Ace Attorney, an interesting version of Holmes used to be Taiqing’s roommate, and his disappearance is as mysterious as whatever the villainous Worri Arte (yeah) is up to out in that bandit camp.
Meanwhile, Taiqing offers some real smarts when it comes to potions and poisons, and he can also travel through a kind of folded space as an origami fox when it comes time to figure out what’s happened in the past during his locked room mystery.
Rounding up the team is the much earthier Transia, the artist snake who can enter paintings to travel to new spots and who also uses her brushes to cast an illusion known as body paint. Her first ghost story chapter takes a good while to reveal how it connects to the previous two stories, but by now, you know they do, especially because of how important that body paint gift is. And that’s part of Threefold Recital’s biggest strength: this story is deep and intriguing, and even though you know it’s going somewhere, it’s hard to guess every step!
But How Does It Play?
Testing on a Steam Deck, Threefold Recital runs surprisingly great, with a selection of inputs well mapped from the desktop version. As mentioned, that karma mini-game can be a little tricky at first, but platforming through this narrative is nothing difficult, even for this crappy platform gamer. Visually, it’s charming and colorful, with terrific character designs that both furry and non-furry fans will love.
The translation is very good. A handful of minor grammatical errors were noticed here and there, but I never encountered anything that confused me about what was going on. There’s plenty of puns and silly wordplay that land with such an intended groan that it’s another layer of fun to enjoy. The only minor note here is that characters will talk in the style they’re meant to, and while Threefold Recital never goes past the Western ideals of PG/PG-13, bandits and other unsavoury sorts aren’t above dropping a couple of salty caramel curses in their dialogue. Guys like them wouldn’t be.
Interestingly, each chapter of the game is treated like a segment of a traditional platforming game. As you close the book on each mini-scenario, a score list marks off the side quests you did and a variety of silly achievements with punny and in-joke names, but as the screen always reminds us, it’s really not about the score. Just enjoy yourself and explore the story. All the money is good for is a gacha for collectables in between chapters.
Conclusion
Threefold Recital is a delightful surprise, a friendly trip through a fantastical vision of China. Its science fiction and spiritual elements intertwine in ways I never would have thought of, creating a world I genuinely haven’t seen represented before. Its world of animal and human characters come together in neat ways, and as someone who is a big fan of Blacksad (a fantastic, Eisner-winning European noir graphic novel series that’s for mature audiences), this feels closer to the video game that series deserved.
Each main character is unique and charming, making it easy to care about the story they’ve gotten themselves mixed up in. It’s a rich enough world that I hope someday we get to learn even more about it. Initially and quickly charmed, I’ve sat with it just long enough to realize I genuinely love this game, and though I didn’t beat it before the deadline, I’ll be keeping at it until I find out what really happened to the tenth dragon emperor. A delight worth a chance.
Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up
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