Sometimes a game title is one of the journey, not the destination. That's the concept, a minimum of, which was first seriously explored in the aptly-named Journey. Several games since have embraced that wonder of discovery, with Fe being the latest to attempt to capture the magic of the genre.
In Fe, players step into the function of the glowing, tree-climbing, wolf-like creature, eponymously named Fe. While Fe howls like a wolf, he's tiny, walks on two legs, can transport glowing fruit in his front paws, and fairly early on hanging around learns to scamper up trees and glide through the air with feather-like fur. Another animals that live within the forest are of a similarly mystical hybrid nature: owl-like creatures that float through the air like stingrays, mushroom-controlling boars with scorpion tails, and burrowing snakes with frilled necks and antlers, to name a few.
The forest is initially peaceful, and as Fe wanders through its different landscapes, he's able to help out each of the different animal types he discovers and learn their languages. Speech is a powerful tool within the forest. Fe's first howls let him bond using the other animals (made by gently pressing within the right trigger buttons with only the right amount of force to match their tone), temporarily causing his new friends to guide the way forward or use their skills to open a path. Once Fe's helped out each kind of animal, the animals will teach him their language and grant him the ability to master their skills, which boost their own abilities. The deer-creature language, for example, awakens flowers that lift Fe high into the air and allow him to glide to previously-unreachable places, as the bird language lets Fe coax berries from plants.
The animal friends Fe makes also serve an essential function as guides through the span of the game, even though the friendship facet of it is touching, the game sometimes leans on you needing a guide a little too heavily. While Fe seems to want to encourage exploration, a realistic look at the sport is that it's difficult to find the right path around. The map has optional waypoints, but there are few landmarks in the forest itself, which makes it easy to accidentally walk in circles. Distant views diminish into fog, making it difficult to tell how to get from one zone to a different. You can travel rapidly across long distances by riding on the back of the bird-creature or snake-creature, but there's no way of knowing where they'll take you until you're already committed to the ride. Moreover, nearly all things in the game glows or is some sort of crystal, which-although pretty-makes many areas look very similar and can allow it to be hard to choose what's important and what's just a couple of glowing flowers within the grass.
As an effect, the game often has different creatures-including a bird friend that may be summoned anytime following the bird language is unlocked-directly lead the way in which from one place to another. This makes getting lost less frustrating, however it does change the tone of game. I often felt less like I was exploring and more like I had been being led by the nose from area to area, because the proper paths forward were so desperately to find. Stopping as it were to try and grab a collectible or solve a puzzle to get on to a higher ledge would often risk getting turned around and losing the guide, and it felt as though there is more incentive to rush ahead, staying ever close to the guide, than there is to consider my time and check out the environments.
That's not saying that there aren't spectacular moments, though. The moment you learn the deer language is a clear standout and something of the very most climactic scenes of the game, despite happening fairly early on. I will not spoil it here, however when I realized what the game was asking me to complete, it ended up becoming my favorite segment from the game, both conceptually as well as in terms of the unique platforming idea the task presented.
It's just unfortunate that segment from the game happened so early on, because nothing else in the game afterwards managed to reach that same level of awe and feeling of epic scale. Through the game, additionally you encounter enemies, one-eyed, armored beings called the Silent Ones. These enemies are capturing creatures within the forest, and many from the game becomes about Fe sneaking around them and thwarting their efforts.
The actual story all around the Silent Ones' efforts, though, is sort of muddied. Like Journey, Abz^u, and additional games within the genre, Fe tries to tell the storyline from the Silent Ones via a series of petroglyphs hidden around the world. Unlike the former two games, however, Fe tries to tell a much more complicated story, and the final result is just confusing. It worked in Journey, which in fact had a reasonably straightforward story and ten hidden illustrations on walls to provide additional context. In comparison, Fe has a whopping one hundred and fifty two petroglyphs and twelve additional hidden flashbacks-all which can be missed. By the finish of Fe, even if I understood a lot of it by running around from glyph to glyph and trying to decipher this is in every one, I was still left feeling more confused than anything else about why things were happening.
The final result was that I had a better time in Fe after the sport had ended and also the credits had rolled than Used to do during the actual story. There have been forget about animal guides, forget about confusing plots to follow, with no more animals to rescue in the Silent Ones, so I was simply free to roam around and find collectibles and corners of the forest I had missed. It had been still confusing to find my way around, but at least I'd every ability unlocked to fully navigate the planet at that time.
Fe is quite a game, and contains one or two memorable high points, however it doesn't quite ever become what it really wants to be. Too much of the world looks too similar, or is too claustrophobically confusing, to inspire exploration. Animal guides provide some much-needed relief, but simply the truth that it's necessary to add constantly guiding NPCs to some game about wandering around and discovery ought to be a clue that something's wrong. It's a game that's fun for a few hours-and thankfully, it isn't considerably longer than that-but once the story was complete it had not been a world I felt compelled to keep exploring.
