Fey

Fey is an unusual departure from the norm for me. For one I'm forgoing my usual comedic opening and I'm getting straight to the point for once, and two, I usually only review games that don't have any reviews already. But Ashes of Emerald did ask nicely if I would do one and everyone is going on about how Fey is one of those real "diamond in the mud" games so I thought at the very least I should check it out.

This is also a good as time as any for a format change to my reviews. I'll be adding a Basics section that is designed to tell whoever is reading it at a glance what type of game this is and if you'd like to play it. And since I've got nothing better to do I might as well explain what the basics are.

Game type: As well as the genre I'll also inform you of the era the graphic style is like (NES, SNES Ect.) as well as if the gameplay draws any parallels from any well-known franchises.
Length: How long it took me to complete the game or, in some cases, how long I was able to play before giving up in despair.
Difficulty: How hard I personally found the game, though please note, I like hard games and have completed Demons/Dark Souls so you may want to adjust things accordingly.
Defining Phrase: A master of mayhem original. This is a short line or two long quote provided by the developer, with permission from the developer, expressing a thought or feeling that they have about the game or want other people about the game. (Although Fey's defining phase is a bit longer than normal)

Now without further ado, let's review Fey.

The Basics:
Game Type: SNES era, Legend of Zelda inspired Action Adventure.
Length: 60 to 90 minutes
Difficulty: Reasonable
Defining Phrase: I remember it like it was yesterday. My friend showed me RPGMaker 2000 in our computer class and I was hooked. That was well over 10 years ago and here I sit on the cusp of completing my most challenging project to date. Everyday my inspiration and drive is renewed through constant support from everyone here at RMN and the ever growing light at the end of the tunnel. So here’s to support and making dreams come true! Cheers! – Ashes of Emerald

And For the record I’ll be reviewing the 2012 demo version of the game.

Story:
The story of Fey is centered on boy wonder Landon, who we first meet wallowing in a shady strip joint probably still depressed over the latest voting results of American idol. After being chased out of the building (which just happens to be excellent excuse to explain the controls) the games built in Delorean takes us to Landon’s past where he isn’t quite as bitterly depressed, comedy central just brought back Futurama, and our hero lives in a small village with his grandfather and ill sister Rosy, who is suffering from a terminal case of “Plotitis”. That most peculiar type of ailment that is only as lethal and contagious as it needs to be, but somehow doesn’t hamper her ability to chase after her pet monkey Charlie through the local temple.

The game's story unfolds by jumping between these two points; the dark depressing present (in which most of the game takes place) where Landon with the aid of mysterious shape-shifting spirit companion Picaro, who can take the form of seemingly anything from mice and foxes to signs, must find an artifact known as the Fire Pearl, and other such items related to various gods of classic mythology, on a journey that will involve stealing hot-air balloons, traversing dark caverns and hunted pirate ship in the middle of the desert. And flashbacks to the past revealing how Landon got into this situation in the first place.

This style of storytelling works well here and Ashs dose pull it off rather well, even if Landon’s character is as flat as a cardboard cut-out of himself to me (but then again he is a protagonist in a Legend of Zelda style game and he can speak which basically makes him Gordon Freeman compared to the rest of the room). Unfortunately starting things off in medias res does have one notable problem of not giving you any understanding of what is going on or why you're doing it. And this particular problem hits this game right in the gut with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.

There are a lot of questions and mysteries in Fey and the game (at least the version I played) is too short to answer any of them! Why is the Fire Pearl so important I have to risk life and limb for it? For that matter why do I have to collect these artifacts in the first place and why is Picaro so willing to help out? Come to think of it what is Picaro anyway? The gamepage says that he's a spirit the game itself proper never does. Without any prior knowledge my best guess would be that he's a trauma induced hallucination or an existential manifestation of Landon's subconscious or something like that. Large conspicuous details that the games whole plot hinges on, the how, the where, the why, and I don't know what they are! All I could gather from my time with Fey was that the fire artifacts was really important, Isis is a bitch, and that Picaro is perhaps secretly evil. I only say Picaro is evil because gaming has taught me to distrust shape-shifting spirits which only I can see and is overly helpful. Of course if he is secretly evil he's doing a very good job at hiding it.

Aesthetics (graphics/sound/mapping):
For the perplexing joy to a lot of you reading this, everything in Fey is custom, and anything that isn’t custom is edited heavily. Even the dialog boxes are custom, each colour coded so you can tell who is speaking, which honestly is not as helpful as it sounds when there are more than two people involved in a conversation. Personally I think this is going a bit overboard. Especially when the dialog box is only half the size of standard box, but then most of the dialog in this game is only a sentence or two long anyway.

The benefit of this customization is there are some wonderful sprite animations. Like the scene in the beginning were Landon is fishing with his Grandfather, or if you step to close to some fire Landon's sleeve will catch alight and he will casually try to put it out.

Speaking of which; I love the fire in this game. In most RM games (and even in most of the SNES era games) fire is represented by two or three pillars of flame dotted around the screen while the screen flashes red. In Fey though it's a blaze of flames of all shapes and sizes and it's everywhere and it feels like an inferno as it slowly envelops everything. It's just a shame the flames themselves don't look better. Thay're quite pixalated and look more like they belong in an 8-bit NES game, but I suppose you can't have everything.

If there's one problem I have with the graphics in Fey is that there are quite a few instances of jagged pixalated sprites that hamper the overall quality and that things are just a bit too dark and gritty for my tastes. Basically take Link to the Past, and put it through the colour filter they use for Gears of War and you have Fey's graphics in a nutshell. Everything is either brown or gray and the few things that aren't, like the grass or the odd body of water, is very dark grass and very dull water. While this does fit the tone and atmosphere of the game very well, and I may be partially biased because I'm sick of dark gritty ass games everywhere, but the fact that I had to make the comparison to of all things Gears of War cannot be a good thing.

The other disappointment for me was the music. I could tell you that it wasn't very good, but I'm not because I couldn't tell because the music made no impact on me whatsoever! I recognized two tracks from the RTP at the very beginning, but then the rest of the soundtrack faded into the distance. I didn't even realize it was there half the time. I know its called background music, but you don't actually want it to fade into the background. It didn't help that I had to max the volume on my computer to hear anything, although that's probably more a problem with my actual PC. It could also be I was too engrossed with the rest of the game to really pay attention to the BGM. But I do believe that good music can add a lot and can make a great game into an amazing game. The fact that the soundtrack left me with nothing is nothing short of disappointing.

Gameplay:
The first thing you will learn within the first 10 minutes of Fey is that the Z key is your friend. You use it for almost everything here. You press Z to talk to people, to open doors, to vault over small obstacles like fences (provided the auto jump doesn't do it for you) and most importantly of all, you press Z to smash the crap out of stuff with your sword. Of course I didn't know he was using a sword when I started playing because the attack animation is Landon punching the air with a weird blur forming in front of him. I just assumed that Landon was a practitioner of the Fist of the Northern Star style of martial arts and whose punches where able to produce shock-waves that demolished small plants and jugs and he could hit so hard it would cause his opponents to spontaneously combust.

Other than the Z key the other button you'll rely on is the X key. It allows you to use your traditional sub-weapon, first of which you'll obtain is a (thankfully) unlimited supply of bombs. An adventuring item so prevalent I should not have to explain how they work or what they do to anyone born before 2004. I did find them awkward to use sometimes tough. Occasionally I would throw the bomb when I wanted to place them or place the bomb when I wanted to throw them, but this only became annoying in a couple of fights which I'll get to later.

There are also a number of quick-time events scattered throughout the game as well and these surprisingly gave me the most difficultly to deal with because unless you have the reflexes of a cat jacked up on 50 gallons of coffee, or know exactly what's coming, you will most likely fail and die brutally and horribly. So if Picaro ever come up and says: "Hay I think something bad might happen, perhaps you should save" freaking do it!

The game also has itself a custom menu, where you can save, view the treasures you have collected (which unfortunately was disabled for the demo I played) and various other options like making the health gauge invisible (why someone would want to do that is beyond me). It also displays the area map, which is useless in every dungeon because none of the dungeons have a map. It does aid in exploring the various towns though. As well as showing you you're objective with a big red diamond it also shows which building you can explore and whether you have done so. It's a useful tool for exploring some of the larger cities.

But I suppose I should get to the action part of the Action Adventure shouldn't I?

Your health in Fey is measured in leaves that quickly regenerate if you go for enough time without being hit by anything, which is a godsend because even the most basic enemy can take you from "fine" to "holy crap I'm going to die" in a few hits and can be surprisingly durable until you upgrade your weapon.

Fortunately most of the enemies you will face are rats and bats, which will just move around aimlessly and won't actively try to attack you. That is until you get to you get to the pirate ship and run into the red phantom pirates. These awesome/terrifying foes not only chase you down they hit like a ton of bricks, are capable of possessing you in which case you have to exercise them by pressing X repeatedly before they eat your soul, and can only be killed by finding there remains and setting them on fire. It's awesome.

But fear not, even if your health does fall to zero (outside the aforementioned instant death cut scenes) you don’t actually die. Landon instead enters a state of near death where you must hammer the up or down keys before he bites it and if you’re successful Landon pops himself back up to full health and you can continue as if nothing ever happened.

Aside from combat there also the mandatory puzzle rooms and they range from moving block puzzles to find the secret door code and some of these are actually quite clever and there’s usually a clue somewhere for the less obvious ones so you’ll rarely become frustrated with them.

Of course this is me we're talking about here. When, in any of these reviews, haven't I ranted on about an instance of gameplay that hasn't annoyed the crap out of me? This is not going to be any exception.

I have two words for you; Boss Fights. There are three such battles in the demo I played and all three aggravated me in some way. The first involved a pair of rock worm things that have to be damaged by your bombs so you can expose their soft stabbable bits. Now remember earlier when I said sometimes throwing bombs doesn't work properly and that can be annoying at times? Well this was one of those times. I would often fudge the placement of the explosives resulting in either the worm managing to crawl out of the way before the bomb exploded or me missing completely. As for the other two; they both involve waiting for your opponent to use a certain attack giving you an opening (or allowing you to create an opening) to wail on them. All well and good, but the frustration here lies in the fact the bosses do not know when the hell to die! Even after I got myself a magic sword that grew more powerful every time I hit something, provided you don't get hit and at level three the sword can kill most normal enemies in one hit, the bosses took a redonkulous amount of hits before they died. That third boss especially, it took like 10/15 minutes for me to put it down! And it does not help that you cannot tell whether your attacks are even working as all the sword strikes made the same "clink" sound effect whether the enemy was vulnerable or not. I know it would be a bit much to ask for the enemy to flash if they take damage, but some visual representation that the enemy is even being hurt would have been appreciated.

Overall though, if I had to describe Fey's gameplay I'd say it's "user-friendly". It's quick and easy to get into and all those elements, the regenerating health, the near death, the saving before a killer quick time event, are all there to keep the game's frustrations to a minimum. I've placed the games difficulty as "reasonable" and it's largely because of these features because without them this game would be brutal and I'll be honest with you, despite the fact I love a challenge, I appreciate the fact that those features are there to keep thing running smoothly. Fey is a more story focused game anyway, and its gameplay reflects this, keeping the game at a constant pace so you can enjoy Landon's tale without hurling a keyboard at something.

Final Verdict:
OK I admit it. When I was a boy I saw my parents murdered in front of me as we were coming home from the movies, so now I dress in a mask and a cape and wonder the night bringing criminals to justice with my own special brand of vigilantism. I also think Fey is a great game that should be played by everyone here.

Yes I know that sounds strange considering I spent most of this review ranting on about everything I found wrong with it, but I'm an accentuate the negative type of guy and the games of such high quality that anything I didn't complain about can be contend on to be good.

Even though I wasn’t a fan of the graphic style it fits the tone of the game perfectly and all the movements and animations where a treat. Even though I found the bosses tedious I had a lot of fun with the combat and jumping over rooftops and pits Assassins Creed style. And even though the story left a bunch of unanswered questions the story was well written and engrossing. I don’t doubt Ash’s ability to answer these questions either; I’m just concerned that they won’t be answered early enough before people stop giving a crap.

I’m honestly looking forward to the full version of the game coming out at the end of the year. This is a four star game easy, four and a half if things go well. And the only reason I’m not giving it five stars is because I never give anything five stars. Unless of course said game is a complete 100% accurate remake of Daemons Souls on 2K and the game somehow is able to give me doughnuts though my monitor and fluffs my pillows at night.