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Do not say farewell to this one!

  • NTC3
  • 02/10/2017 08:44 PM
  • 1857 views
The Maid of Fairewell Heights is another offbeat game that has been recently ported to us from the homeland of RPGMaker. While the country of origin can hardly an ironclad stamp of quality (just look at SIN for an obvious counterpoint), this one is deserves many accolades indeed.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)


Let’s get over the bad things first: it’s hard to accuse The Maid of Fairewell Heights of being a truly good-looking game. It uses a whole range of resources for mapping and music, which you can consult on your own in the developer’s room. The various sound effects are fine for the entertaining tone the game is going for, but the mapping is less consistent, and for every nice-looking screen like the one above, there are several that don’t look so good. However, the largest issue is definitely with the game’s CGs: while they’re often the most attractive part of many RM games and are frequently used to make up for the mapping shortfalls, here, the low-detail, high-pixelisation artstyle used for most of them takes a rather long while to fully get used to.



Self-deception is a powerful thing.

Thankfully, you do get used to it over the course of the game, as its stronger areas come to the forefront. To round off this section, the largely light-hearted music is quite fine, though no more. I can’t recall any of those themes now, but they work pretty well in the moment-to-moment gameplay. As an example, the jolly title theme jingle completes the bright menu screen well, and already promises some silly, fluffy opening, right?

Storyline




The first two screens of the game.

Uh oh! That’s the thing about The Maid of Fairewell Heights: it has an almost unparalleled capacity to execute some extreme tone shifts, and do so well, to boot. I’m tempted to post all the intro screenshots here to illustrate my point, but these ones, occurring right after protagonist's phone suddenly rings out, should do:





At first, there's the dark humour of this otherwise horrific situation. Then, the next line, revealing the jobs she is offered are of the assassination variety, immediately throws the built-up sympathy for her in doubt. Lastly, when you do pick up that phone, the voice on the other end is extremely accented, and instead of offering a now-pointless contract, he gives her a new chance at life. Yes, 3-second animation of pregnant belly later, and the story skips to 18 years in the future, when the formerly-unnamed assassin grows up into a blue-haired girl named Marshmallow (Marshie), ready to take on a cleaning job in the Fairewell Heights hotel, being blissfully unaware of anything to do with her past self. In fact, it’s probably not a spoiler to say that she never truly finds out, and while there’s one minor-yet-recurring character who probably knows the truth, and thus serves as a link between the two worlds, his behaviour changed so much you might not realize it until near the very end, in spite of the clues being in plain sight in retrospect.

Anyway, the game might be short, but it’s highly structured regardless. The bulk of the game’s writing is devoted to Marshie’s jobs on each floor of the hotel, which she soon discovers is haunted, and so her tasks morph from simple cleaning to satisfying the quirks of the not-quite departed souls and other supernatural beings. There are four of these, and they’re notably distinct from each other, at times functioning as their own self-containing narratives. Their one defining trait is again their capacity for taking total tonal whiplash and somehow making it work with the narrative. To give you a hopefully not-too-spoilery example from the first half of the game, The Maid of Fairewell Heights has the kind of story where you discover a grisly murder scene, analyse it from every angle, settle on an entirely plausible murder theory, then have it entirely demolished by the ghost of the victim, who then asks you to clear up his last masterpiece from errors (even though many people find them quite convenient), which then leads up to a fragment of his soul begging you not to erase it, even though its existence might prevent the original ghost from passing on. You’re initially offered a choice on dealing with the situation, but they boil down to Marshie refusing to let the whole thing get too dark.



A different choice from the later area. These options do NOT mean the same thing, either, so put the 2nd one first!

That’s actually another thing about Maid of Fairewell Heights: it understands well that there are times when the actions needed for the plot to advance might contradict with the idea the player has of what is ultimately their protagonist, which can lead to a rather significant clash in their perception of the story (i.e. Immortal). Thus, whenever a moment like this appears, it offers choices that do not cardinally change anything in the long run (it still has 1 ending after all), but they do feel meaningful in the moment. Don’t agree with the idea Marshie would immediately find her client, the orphaned 16 y.o hotel owner Farewell kinda cute? Sure, just be like me and answer that she really cares about the money first and foremost when he asks what is still keeping her around! Besides the dialogue being entertainingly in-character either way, some following conversations actually DO seem to call back to the exact lines you chose, which is great even if the main plot ultimately weaves them all together.

Speaking of which, the main plot segments are interleaved in between the “room stories”, happening roughly as Marshie goes from one area to another. As you advance through the game, they progressively shed more light on Farewell and his hapless dealings with the demonic, leading up to the main ending showdown of sorts. It’s more than a little haphazard when compared to the rest of the game, but it still closes the game well enough. Meanwhile, there’s also another plot thread running throughout the entire game, and which is manifested through the regular phone calls she receives. It’s largely comic relief, and I already hinted heavily at its main secret earlier, so let this be all you’ve heard from me about it.

Gameplay



It’s simple, yet quite inventive, and clearly tailored to the story, instead of the other way around. Again, it is mainly about the interactions in a typical “press space/Z near an object type of way”, but while the process doesn’t change, the context always does. While in the screenshot above you might be doing this to remove the rubbish and reorder the stuff in the room properly (and later sweep up everything so that it looks more like this.) In the next rooms, though, you would be interacting with the stuff to “reconstruct the murder scene”, or to do “spot the difference”. There’s even a moment when you need to pick up the desired amount of items for the customers of the shop you’re temporarily entrusted with, entering the right number when picking something up.



Life in the Warrens must've gotten pretty tiring for this proper woman.

It’s simple, but it works, and I like how the creator had resisted the urge to stick QTEs minigames and such at key interaction moments. I've seen quite a few games do this, ostensibly seeking to increase the gameplay quotient, but instead merely overcomplicating things with no benefit to immersion, so it's nice for this to buck the trend. Same logic means that there are no proper battles in the game as well. However, there’s a moment when a golden mushroom in the shop above will resist getting picked up and bite hard, unless you pick up a sword off the shelf and cut it to harmless, easily collectable pieces, and it’s much funnier. Moreover, a battle interface does sorta turn up early on, for a gag:



Turns out, Apocalypse Never wasn’t the only Japanese rmk game to have thought of this! (And don’t worry, having a Spray insta-kills them. Otherwise, they insta-scare you into quitting!)

Conclusion


In all, The Maid of Fairewell Heights is yet another surprising gem from the wider RM community which shows how much a truly inventive creator can achieve in what is still dismissed by the overly-large percentage of the gaming public as an antique and worthless engine series. Oh well, the joke’s on them for missing out on this and more.

Posts

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Thanks for the in-depth review! I'm glad you enjoyed the game as much as you did as well!
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