Fey

While playing Fey, I loved it. It looks beautiful. The custom gameplay is smooth and rewarding. It has a fox.

It's only afterwards, thinking about how the whole game came together, that I realize it doesn't really come together at all. Instead of being a player-directed adventure like most RPGs, Fey is more like a series of connected challenge rooms. This would be fine, except that there are many troubling elements that make it seem like it was supposed to be a more expansive game until the production ran out of time/motivation and cancelled a lot of features.



Fey is undeniably one of the most polished and impressive games to ever come out of RM2K3, even more remarkable because of the limited resources available from the 2K generation. Ashes has pieced together some gameplay styles that even veterans of the platform will marvel at, but the game is more like a gallery of technical achievements than a single cohesive experience.



Yes, Fey uses an action battle system, and I'm happy to say that this game joins the likes of Valerie's Letter and Antiarctica in that its ABS is responsive and fun. Even more impressive is that Fey features a whole series of different types of weapons. You have blades, a slingshot, timed bombs, and just when you think Ashes is out of ideas you get a flamethrower. Each weapon comes with its own gameplay style and they all work perfectly. There are also amazing touches that reward you for playing with the weapons, the least of which is the large amount of breakable scenery. (Vegetable gardens in video games last about as long as dogs in horror movies.)

Environments are also fully populated with context actions, such as leaping fences and mantling off of cliff edges. Exploring the environment almost always leads you to treasure or a bonus.

In addition to the weapons themselves, there is a custom menu which allows the player to upgrade Landon's stats and fiddle with HUD options, and it even displays a map in town that keeps track of which buildings you've all ready visited.

In hot competition with the custom systems for being the most impressive feature of this game is the scenery and character graphics. The atmosphere created through mapping and visual effects is exquisite, with standout areas being the dreary city of Auleberon and some extremely sinister haunted mines. There's also a ghost ship, unique in that it's beached in a dried-up ravine, and a brief tromp through a convincingly cluttered and confusing swamp. Characters are constantly striking expressive poses during scenes, and the sheer number of custom sprite poses is one of the distinguishing features of this game.



But, as enjoyable as each individual feature is, they don't gel into a cohesive experience. There are a lot of rough edges that make it seem like this game was supposed to be a lot larger than it is.

The biggest clue is the "item shops" -- inside kill quotes because there are no items in this game! Item shops are still kicking around town, though, and it looks like at one point you were supposed to be able to buy items by choosing them on a counter. (In the final product, these counters are constantly "out of stock.") There is also a combat trainer, and it seems like Landon is going to be returning to him frequently throughout the game as he gets stronger, but this feature also goes conspicuously under-utilized.

The town maps are similarly impressive, but pointless. Every time Landon visits a town, he simply walks from one end to the other, taking in the sights, and then the story shuttles you away to the next area, never to return. What's the point in having a map that marks which buildings you've visited?

As for upgrading Landon's skills: since this is actually the only use for money in the game, it won't be long before you've purchased the entire roster. Some of your skills are labelled as "Level 1", but don't be fooled; there is no level 2. Seriously. Yet another clue that this game is only a fraction of the original vision.



The haunted mines in chapter 6 tend to sum up all of Fey's foibles in microcosm: the environment is brilliant and the Flame Gauntlet weapon is a riot to play with, having some highly amusing effects on certain objects in the environment. If that wasn't enough, in dim areas the gauntlet even lights up the room! There are also some clever mechanics introduced with TNT crates and furnaces, at such a pace that I felt certain it was building toward a climactic puzzle or boss fight -- but no such thing happens. These fantastic gameplay elements are ultimately dropped without ever reaching their full potential. And then the boss fight is entirely QTEs.



The actual story in the game is less noteworthy than its presentation. Landon Ferngrass is a young man who has hit a film-noir-esque nadir of drinking away his sorrows in a strip club, before he is apparently of age to be in strip clubs. At some point before the beginning of the action he partnered up with a shapeshifting creature named Picaro whose motives remain a mystery for quite some time.

The story starts in media res and fills out the backstory gradually through flashbacks, but Landon's motivations are concealed from players for far too long. At first we have no idea what present-day Landon is searching for. We eventually learn that he's after a map that shows ... something. We then learn that the artefact on the map is called the Fire Pearl, which he needs for ... something. There is constant distance between the player and the main character, and while this might be an acceptable narrative device in other media it gives this game an ungrounded feeling. The only reason the player knows where to go next is because the game is a hallway -- there's only ever one way to go.

The narrative gulf is particularly jarring with Picaro. His first scenes take place long after his partnership with Landon has been established in terms of the story, so Landon treats him with a disinterested acceptance that frustrated me. I wanted to know what the deal was with the shapeshifting fox who is apparently important enough to be the mascot for the entire game. Obviously I was aware that there was a chunk of storyline still to be revealed, but instead of feeling that I was experiencing the story through Landon's eyes, I felt like an outsider simply waiting for the narration to deign to give me the rest of the information. (This is one of the key differences between good and bad mystery writing. Cough Dresden Files cough.)



I also had a serious issue with the pivot for the entire story, which is the fact that




Clearly I have a lot of criticisms for Fey, but the fact is that the quality of the ABS and the beauty of the environments were enough to bouy my experience such that these concerns didn't emerge until after the end. It's clear that this game could have used better glue to join all its pieces; perhaps there were great plans that got scaled back at some point. But the pieces that remain are like jewels in a box: well-ordered, meticulously detailed, and brilliant.



SCORE: 4/5

Best features:
Environments, expressive character spries. Oh yeah, and the ABS.

Worst features:
Underutilized gameplay features, backstory kept secret for too long, no final boss.

Best area:
The haunted mines.

Best weapon:
Flame gauntlet

Worst patron deity:
Isis