A song can undo years in the space of four bars, pulling you backward into a version of yourself you thought you had already outgrown by the time the chorus lands. That undoing gets harder to shake off when the trigger arrives by mail, pressed into a sleeve with no title, no artist name, and no B-side to explain itself.
Alice is the one who receives it. She lives a settled, unremarkable life in Bordeaux, working at a bank and sharing an apartment with her fiancé Jean-Baptiste, until the record turns up from Ulysse, an ex she has not heard from in years. Placing the needle down throws her straight back into an old memory, and when the needle lifts and she returns to the present, Jean-Baptiste looks at her like a stranger, because in this version of her life the two never met. Across the Grooves builds every chapter that follows around Alice trying to undo that damage without losing whatever she gained in the process.
Nova-box, the small studio behind it, has been working out of Bordeaux since 2007. This is their third interactive graphic novel, following Along the Edge in 2016 and Seers Isle in 2018, and it carries over the same reputation for letting one small decision reroute an entire life. Writer Geoffroy Vincens spreads Alice’s search across six chapters that each run close to an hour, sending her from Bordeaux out across Europe as she chases down Ulysse and tries to work out where the record came from. I expected a tidy answer somewhere around chapter three. I did not get one, and that turned out to be the right call.
Every choice tracks against a small set of symbols, a spiral, a lightning bolt, a flower, and a skull, and they light up along the top of the screen the moment a decision lands. Nova-box first built this device for Seers Isle and carried the same core idea over here. A short tutorial walks new players through it before the story properly begins, and I came away trusting that my answers were shaping Alice rather than just decorating her, which mattered more once the choices got harder to make cleanly. My one frustration was that none of it lets you rewind mid-chapter to test a different branch. Once a choice locks in, it stays locked until a fresh playthrough, which made me wish I had held back on a couple of the bigger calls.
What starts as Alice chasing down an old boyfriend stops being that within a couple of chapters, tipping into parallel realities, occultism, and a network of people who seem to know more about the record than they let on. One conversation with a record collector named Arthur Pullman, who lectures Alice at length about Led Zeppelin, sent me looking things up afterward just to check how much of what he says holds up.
Every time a character namedrops a band, from Led Zeppelin to Aphrodite’s Child to Hawkwind, a small glossary entry unlocks with a real description of the group along with the developers’ own favorite tracks from their catalog, and I ended up treating it less like a footnote and more like a mixtape recommendation from someone with real taste. It is a strange thing for a French visual novel to double as a classic rock primer, but by the third or fourth entry I stopped questioning why and just let it happen.
Nicolas Fouqué, working with Mélanie Ertaud, illustrated hundreds of hand drawn scenes across the game, and the European comic book style holds together whether Alice is standing in a Bordeaux record shop or somewhere stranger entirely once the story stops behaving. The linework stays warm even when the events on screen do not, and by the time the ugliest turns hit, that warmth is exactly why they stung.
Camille Marcos and Julien Ponsoda, working together as Illustrason, composed and arranged more than fifty minutes of original music for the game, recorded and mixed in Bordeaux with Christelle Canot on vocals, Charles-Henry Martin on piano, and Lili Richard-Gautier on cello, while Vincens wrote every lyric himself. None of it is voice acted. Across the Grooves runs on subtitled text in English, French, and Latin American Spanish rather than full spoken dialogue, and once I adjusted to that, the songs did more emotional lifting than any voiced line could have, especially in scenes where the lyrics were clearly written to sit inside the plot rather than float above it.
Very Positive across 102 Steam reviews, a spot on Les Inrockuptibles’ top ten games of 2020 at #9, a place on Digital Spy’s top eleven that same year, and an Official Selection slot at LudoNarraCon in 2021 all followed the June 2020 release, alongside earlier recognition at EGX London’s Leftfield Collection and a Best Game win at Bordeaux’s own Indie Game Factory back in 2019. Rachel Capie handled the English localization and Alix de Yelst the proofreading, and the région Nouvelle-Aquitaine helped fund the whole production, and that backing shows in how lived-in Bordeaux feels, record shops and all, like somewhere I had actually walked through rather than a generic backdrop.
I will not say what happens to Alice or Ulysse specifically, only that the ground kept shifting under her right up to the last page. The particular kind of bittersweet it left me with is not something a secondhand record has any business creating.
Verdict
Across the Grooves turns an unlabeled record into six hours of Alice quietly losing her grip on a life she thought was settled, and the symbol system behind her choices gives that unraveling real weight instead of cosmetic flavor. Illustrason’s music and Vincens’ lyrics carry scenes that have no spoken dialogue to lean on, and Fouqué and Ertaud’s linework holds the whole thing together even as the story stops playing by the rules it opened with. It earned its place on more than one best-of-2020 list, and six hours in, I understood exactly why.
