Fairytale

Intro

"Fairytale" is a puzzle game that was being developed by JoRu using RPG Maker VX that began development as a byproduct of the developer trying to improve their various skills. Unfortunately this project eventually went into indefinite hiatus mode and like many old projects on this site I have no idea why this project was left to rot. To make matters worse JoRu's profile doesn't contain any links to a personal webpage and he apparently disappeared about two months after joining the site and hasn't been heard from since as far as I can tell. Though, I suppose why this project was left in the lurch is far less important than discussing the content that is available.

Story
Summary

In this game we take on the roll of Violet, a young woman, running away from her abusive granduncle who enjoys living in the middle of forest where he can do whatever he wants to his grandnieces with no one else being the wiser. In fact, Violet's three sisters all attempted to escape before her and only met sticky ends for their trouble. As such the risk of death is high, but staying and being beaten and worked to death is just as fatal. So we might as well try and soar like an eagle through the skies than die a slow and painful death.

Greatest Strength/Weakness

The game definitely fits it's theme of being a fairytale. After all, fairytales were pretty grim back in the day. So a game about a woman trying to escape her murderous granduncle fits in rather well. On the other hand Violet is mostly a silent protagonist which makes relating to her a lot more difficult.

Gameplay

On the gameplay front the game contains a few different puzzles. Though these puzzles tend to be a lot harder than the developer intended in some cases, but I'll talk about the easier puzzles first. The easier puzzles consist of traveling through tunnels and pulling switches in a room as quickly as possible in order to reach a torch in order to put it out before a timer reaches zero. Failure to do so will result in you losing one of your five lives. The next puzzle involves smashing rocks in order to pull a lever in order to make spikes raise and lower in order to advance through an area. Suffice to say this puzzle is practically brainless. The final puzzle consists of working out the correct series of prompts to present to a woman with the final torch you need to put out.

The next puzzle on the other hand is where people frequently run into trouble.

Angelvamp
i have a little problem with the game in the first tower i don't know what i must do!

author=bicfarmer
. . . Thats the problem right there, you get stuck running an invisible maze with 5 lives, and if you walk on the wrong spot too many times you will game over and have to go back to a slow cutscene. No manual saving. Since this is a demo anyway, I'm not too eager to try and complete this unfair maze again.

To be fair, it took me a while to understand what the developer was aiming for as well. So much so that I got pretty annoyed with this puzzle and even knowing how to approach it this puzzle is pretty damn tedious. So if you don't want a lot of help I'd suggest skipping to the next section of this review.

For starters when you enter this room your given an important hint by the developer. This hint being that the worlds "follow the light is in blue text. This blue text is meant to help you realize when you turn on the blue torch that your meant to move towards the center of the blue light marked in the image below.



At this point your meant to change direction and move towards the red/orange light, but in order to make this puzzle more difficult you can only turn on the lights for one torch at a time.



In other words the secret to cracking this puzzle is taking your time and keeping a piece of paper handy so you can write how many steps you took up, down, left, and right as you alternate between light ball targets. Of course the game does throw a slight curveball with some green lights that get added halfway through after you push a button, but they merely exist as part of a short alternating sequence that goes green, red/orange, green, and blue. After that you go back to the standard pattern with the only other exception being a white light that pops up when another button is pushed. Otherwise you stick to alternating between blue and red/orange throughout the puzzle.

As for why this puzzle is tedious. Well if you don't want to die a lot your going to have to be constantly going backwards in order to make your next target in the sequence visible. This is why the paper and pencil is so important for this one.

Suffice to say this puzzle is basically as far as I got before I gave up since the next puzzle is a sound based puzzle and to be brutally honest I'm absolute garbage at those. Though to be fair even bicfarmer got stumped by it if his comment on the game is anything to go by.

bicfarmer
. . . but there is an extremely difficult sound puzzle right after it that I couldnt get even after listening to the correct sequence multiple times.

So at least I'm not alone in getting stumped by it.

Graphics

Oddly enough I'd argue this is the game's strongest point by far. While this is still clearly a RPG Maker game. It's hard to deny that JoRu utilized his tilesets extremely well. As such this game is very aesthetically pleasing. A result that was achieved by JoRu using a combination of assets no less.

JoRu
. . . I use mostly Mack-tiles, but with a small bit of RTP and then some stuff I've edited and a small amount of XP-tiles that I edited to look good with the rest of the VX-graphics.

Sound

On the sound side of things the game is alright for the most part, but I'll admit the song that stuck out the most for me was the inclusion of the theme for the shadow temple in "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time". Though, I suppose it would be hard not to notice that song considering it dominates the room containing the invisible floor puzzle.

Conclusion

In my opinion this game had a lot of potential and probably would have been featured at some point if it had been completed. As it stands we have a beautiful demo for a project that will probably never be completed. As such this project just serves as another reminder why I usually don't play demos or early access games on steam. On a brighter note this review will hopefully knock this game off of the list of projects with downloads, but no reviews.