At around 3.30 pm today, 8 November 2025, I finished playing Draugen, a single-player first-person mystery game developed by Red Thread Games. It is set in 1920s Norway and describes itself as a “Fjord Noir”, a psychological narrative that blends mystery with atmosphere. The game won the Norwegian Game of the Year award in 2019. You play as Edward Charles Harden, an American traveller searching for his missing sister in a small, forgotten coastal village, accompanied by his ward, Lissie. The game is meant to be experienced rather than mastered. It unfolds like a short novel: you explore, observe, and let the story move at its own pace.

I started the game last night and completed it within a day. It does not take long because the path is mostly fixed. You follow the order of the narrative the way the developers intended, walking through a series of linear discoveries. The control is minimal... mostly walking, interacting with objects, and following Lissie as she pushes the story forward. There are no puzzles that demand time, and no freedom to explore beyond what is required. It is a game of direction rather than discovery.

I got stuck for a while during the mine chapter because my computer could not handle the performance requirements. The loading was slow, and the visuals glitched often that I had to restart the game a few times. Still, I forced through and managed to complete it. By that point, I had already sensed how the story was going to end, yet I wanted to see how the final scenes would play out.

Lissie became more unbearable near the climax. She is childish, restless, and refuses to understand the weight of what is happening. Her voice fills every silence. During conversations, I often avoided looking at her face, letting her talk until the dialogue was over. She is both the most frustrating and most necessary element in the game, the one who keeps Edward moving even when the player wants to stop. She acts as a guide, and ironically, without her constant chatter, you would not reach the ending.

The ending itself carries several plot twists, and the final revelation about Edward changes how the story should be read. The game is quiet, almost deceptively simple, yet its psychological core becomes clearer only near the end. If you pay attention, you will notice how even the main menu background changes gradually from colour to black and white as the story progresses, mirroring Edward’s state of mind.

The Viking references in the narrative feel shallow. They appear in fragments, but even if they were removed, the story would remain the same. They function more as cultural decoration than as substance. I expected more integration of folklore after my recent experiences with northern-themed games, but Draugen stands apart in its own restrained modern storytelling.

Maybe part of why I played it through is because it reminded me of Norway itself. I visited Tromsø earlier this year, and the fjord landscapes in the game carried that same stillness... a kind of quiet isolation that belongs only to the north. Even if the game did not move me the way others did, its setting felt familiar. That alone made the hours worth it.

Labels: Game, motivation