It’s dark out, and it’s raining quite a bit. I’m standing in the middle of the street, facing a shop with a large, bright sign saying ‘Dépanneur’. There’s no one else about but me, and just by being a bright spot in an otherwise empty and wet street, the shop already feels incredibly inviting.
I like it when the main thing you need to know about a game is in its title. “Pet The Pup At The Party”, “A Short Hike” or, in this case, “Dépanneur Nocturne – a Dépanneur at night. A dépanneur, Google tells me, is the Canadian equivalent of a corner shop or a convenience store. You can get drinks and snacks, a few groceries, maybe a set of pens or a small sewing kit. Most of them are open all hours.
Dépanneur Nocturne is about the experience of shopping for a gift, but in that simple setup, it contains multitudes. Your partner has been working late and you just want to get them a little something to show your appreciation, which, quite frankly, is relationship goals right there. Normally, going to a corner shop for a gift would seem about as heartwarming as getting a last-minute birthday card from a petrol station, but everything about this dépanneur is a little bit special. It’s not just the fact that it’s a shop owned by a salamander, in a world of anthropomorphic animals who do jobs that fit the advantages of their individual physiology. I want to hear more about the bands and events depicted on the posters around the shop. I’m excited at the thought of a group of orchard gods, revered but also nonchalantly turned into capsule toys. There’s a shop cat you can pet: does this mean there are animal people but also animals? I found so many little details that immediately tickled my imagination.
More importantly, between the bottles of wine and boxes of ice cream, I find a few truly special items. Scrabbling only for what stands out eventually leads the shopkeeper to invite me to a very special place, the place where the magic happens – the back of the shop! I don’t want to spoil everything, but Dépanneur Nocturne is a magical, perfectly self-contained experience that can take you either half an hour or slightly longer, depending on how thorough you want to be. It’s incredibly efficient not just with building a whole world with a few sentences, but also with creating a nice atmosphere with a limited colour palette and a few accents. If you’ve played developer KO-OP’s previous game Gnog, you know they are specialists at picking colours and shapes to create a certain mood, and Dépanneur Nocturne is no exception.