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kjorteoOkay but I can explain.
This all started back when a certain friend linked me to a certain Steam game with a very eye-catching image so we could boggle together. Like, wow. That's... wow.
Then I decided I was morbidly curious and it was one dollar, so you know what? Fuck it, sure why not.
(I later found out that said friend had expected that reaction from me and was subtly trying to steer me into being a sort of mineshaft canary to check things out for them. Which I did, so hooray for me being predictable.)
Farnham Fables is a series of classic styled first-person point and click adventure games, generally very short and easy because the experience is meant to be more friendly than anything else and you aren't listening to a word of this because you're still gawking at the topless lizard lady, aren't you.
Let's get the obvious elephant in the room out of the way, then: Yes, there is lots of nudity, including preteen characters. This is most apparent in episode 1, where a large portion is set in... it's not a nudist colony but it may as well be for the characters you tend to meet. Crotchless Ken doll anatomy keeps anything too scandalous from happening below the belt, but there are definitely nipples.
This was almost at the forefront of episode one, but it calms down somewhat in later episodes. The developer told me that there was a very deliberate decision to put the worst of it right upfront so as to avoid surprising anyone with it later; if you can handle episode one, you can handle anything. Which isn't to say that sort of content isn't there in episodes two and three as well. It's just more behind closed doors, to the point that if you go out of your way enough to see the nudie Easter eggs, that's pretty much your fault at that point.
There, that's addressed. Now if I can turn your attention away from the lizard boobies (I know this may be difficult) there's an actual game here and that's kind of worth talking about too.
Farnham games are, as I said, short and easy. My first run through episode 3, which involved me figuring out the puzzle solutions for the first time, took all of about 40 minutes after counting some exploration and randomly looking at things. The sense of conflict and danger is generally low, as well. For example, episode 2 was about a girl on a farm who accidentally let one of their cows break the fence and escape, so the primary objectives as her siblings are to find the cow, fix the fence, and cheer her up because she feels bad about the whole thing. I only ever felt the need to save once in episode 3, and even that was just because Steam wasn't letting me take a screenshot so I wanted to see if closing and reopening it would help. By a deliberate design decision, the actual meat of solving the puzzles and beating the game is separated from the poking-around-at-stuff exploration and generally streamlined; you could probably do a TAS of episode 1 in about 40-50 seconds once you already knew what to click on and skipped through the text.
It's pure fluff, is what I'm saying. If you're a die-hard Sierra/Infocom veteran who thinks it's not a real adventure game unless it murders you and makes the game unwinnable at least eight times per screen, this isn't for you. This is a simple, happy, stress-free little experience where characters are generally nice to each other and hug their comparatively easy problems out because games are fun.
The true meat of any Farnham game is the dizzying amount of optional interactions. There is a unique response for everything you can think to try. Sure, you kind of expect to be able to look at/examine (which are two different verbs in this game)/talk to/rub your entire inventory against everyone in adventure games, and maybe the fancy ones won't punt too many things to a generic "I can't use these things together" response. Farnham takes it to the next level where everything has a response, and also the GIVE command works on things you don't actually own, which allows you to rub any two elements on the screen against each other. You can give a rock to a flower even if you can't collect either, and of course it produces a different response than if you give the flower to the rock.
For people, "Give X to Y" is usually interpreted to mean "Display X's perspective on what they think about Y" and of course that's going to be different from Y's thoughts on X. If I'm doing the math right, a room with n named elements in it contains (n * (n - 1)) such combinations, meaning a room with 10 people in it has 90 unique responses to command combinations the player can enter for Give alone. Add in the other verbs, the inventory....
Also, Farnham Fables games have screens that look like this.
Like, several of them.
These are all minor NPCs in this particular episode. None of them play an important role. None of them need so much as a name in any other game. Here, the author has this world built to such an alarming extent that not is every single one of them named, but if you want to know what the girl in the blue shorts (Linda) thinks of the girl in the blue skirt (Yolanda) then the author has everyone's thoughts on everyone all figured out and ready to go.
Episode 3 in particular stars Philip, one of the three princes from episode 1, who has extreme animal husbandry powers up to and including the ability to talk to animals. The plot is that he's giving a presentation about magical beasts (manticores, gryphons, etc.) to the school, but there was an accident and all five of the animals got loose. It's up to Philip to round them up, which is easier than it sounds because he can talk to them and because most of them just have a very basic "sure, I'll come back to the gym with you but I'm hungry and want a snack first" type problem. One thing I really appreciated--which, again, shows the downright terrifying levels of thought put into this setting--is that each animal can be Described which returns an essay-length National Geographic-type article on exactly how they work here. (Unicorns only appearing to virgins is a myth, but the truth is that they can sense the intent of people approaching them and whether they mean them harm. Etc.) You basically get to hear Philip's entire presentation, if you so choose. It goes on for pages, it's impressive as hell, and I loved it.
All in all, I spent longer writing this entry than I did actually playing and beating episode 3 tonight. You probably spent longer reading this entry than it would take you to play and beat it. However, that's okay, because I know for a fact I've only seen a tiny fraction of it. The rest is there whenever I go back to it. That's why these games are designed so "beat the game" and "poke around at stuff" are two entirely different, unrelated goals.
So, to the person who threw that link at me way back when: Come on in, the water is... uh... kind of weird and definitely hard to explain to your friends, but it's surprisingly nice.
This all started back when a certain friend linked me to a certain Steam game with a very eye-catching image so we could boggle together. Like, wow. That's... wow.
Then I decided I was morbidly curious and it was one dollar, so you know what? Fuck it, sure why not.
(I later found out that said friend had expected that reaction from me and was subtly trying to steer me into being a sort of mineshaft canary to check things out for them. Which I did, so hooray for me being predictable.)
Farnham Fables is a series of classic styled first-person point and click adventure games, generally very short and easy because the experience is meant to be more friendly than anything else and you aren't listening to a word of this because you're still gawking at the topless lizard lady, aren't you.
Let's get the obvious elephant in the room out of the way, then: Yes, there is lots of nudity, including preteen characters. This is most apparent in episode 1, where a large portion is set in... it's not a nudist colony but it may as well be for the characters you tend to meet. Crotchless Ken doll anatomy keeps anything too scandalous from happening below the belt, but there are definitely nipples.
This was almost at the forefront of episode one, but it calms down somewhat in later episodes. The developer told me that there was a very deliberate decision to put the worst of it right upfront so as to avoid surprising anyone with it later; if you can handle episode one, you can handle anything. Which isn't to say that sort of content isn't there in episodes two and three as well. It's just more behind closed doors, to the point that if you go out of your way enough to see the nudie Easter eggs, that's pretty much your fault at that point.
There, that's addressed. Now if I can turn your attention away from the lizard boobies (I know this may be difficult) there's an actual game here and that's kind of worth talking about too.
Farnham games are, as I said, short and easy. My first run through episode 3, which involved me figuring out the puzzle solutions for the first time, took all of about 40 minutes after counting some exploration and randomly looking at things. The sense of conflict and danger is generally low, as well. For example, episode 2 was about a girl on a farm who accidentally let one of their cows break the fence and escape, so the primary objectives as her siblings are to find the cow, fix the fence, and cheer her up because she feels bad about the whole thing. I only ever felt the need to save once in episode 3, and even that was just because Steam wasn't letting me take a screenshot so I wanted to see if closing and reopening it would help. By a deliberate design decision, the actual meat of solving the puzzles and beating the game is separated from the poking-around-at-stuff exploration and generally streamlined; you could probably do a TAS of episode 1 in about 40-50 seconds once you already knew what to click on and skipped through the text.
It's pure fluff, is what I'm saying. If you're a die-hard Sierra/Infocom veteran who thinks it's not a real adventure game unless it murders you and makes the game unwinnable at least eight times per screen, this isn't for you. This is a simple, happy, stress-free little experience where characters are generally nice to each other and hug their comparatively easy problems out because games are fun.
The true meat of any Farnham game is the dizzying amount of optional interactions. There is a unique response for everything you can think to try. Sure, you kind of expect to be able to look at/examine (which are two different verbs in this game)/talk to/rub your entire inventory against everyone in adventure games, and maybe the fancy ones won't punt too many things to a generic "I can't use these things together" response. Farnham takes it to the next level where everything has a response, and also the GIVE command works on things you don't actually own, which allows you to rub any two elements on the screen against each other. You can give a rock to a flower even if you can't collect either, and of course it produces a different response than if you give the flower to the rock.
For people, "Give X to Y" is usually interpreted to mean "Display X's perspective on what they think about Y" and of course that's going to be different from Y's thoughts on X. If I'm doing the math right, a room with n named elements in it contains (n * (n - 1)) such combinations, meaning a room with 10 people in it has 90 unique responses to command combinations the player can enter for Give alone. Add in the other verbs, the inventory....
Also, Farnham Fables games have screens that look like this.
Like, several of them.
These are all minor NPCs in this particular episode. None of them play an important role. None of them need so much as a name in any other game. Here, the author has this world built to such an alarming extent that not is every single one of them named, but if you want to know what the girl in the blue shorts (Linda) thinks of the girl in the blue skirt (Yolanda) then the author has everyone's thoughts on everyone all figured out and ready to go.
Episode 3 in particular stars Philip, one of the three princes from episode 1, who has extreme animal husbandry powers up to and including the ability to talk to animals. The plot is that he's giving a presentation about magical beasts (manticores, gryphons, etc.) to the school, but there was an accident and all five of the animals got loose. It's up to Philip to round them up, which is easier than it sounds because he can talk to them and because most of them just have a very basic "sure, I'll come back to the gym with you but I'm hungry and want a snack first" type problem. One thing I really appreciated--which, again, shows the downright terrifying levels of thought put into this setting--is that each animal can be Described which returns an essay-length National Geographic-type article on exactly how they work here. (Unicorns only appearing to virgins is a myth, but the truth is that they can sense the intent of people approaching them and whether they mean them harm. Etc.) You basically get to hear Philip's entire presentation, if you so choose. It goes on for pages, it's impressive as hell, and I loved it.
All in all, I spent longer writing this entry than I did actually playing and beating episode 3 tonight. You probably spent longer reading this entry than it would take you to play and beat it. However, that's okay, because I know for a fact I've only seen a tiny fraction of it. The rest is there whenever I go back to it. That's why these games are designed so "beat the game" and "poke around at stuff" are two entirely different, unrelated goals.
So, to the person who threw that link at me way back when: Come on in, the water is... uh... kind of weird and definitely hard to explain to your friends, but it's surprisingly nice.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-23 03:17 am (UTC)I dunno, I like these sorts of things too!
And now that you've been my canary, I promise I'll get in there EVENTUALLY, I just have a lot to do right now.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-23 03:20 am (UTC)Now that I've been your canary, I can try to do the sword fight with you but the nobles won't be impressed.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-23 05:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-23 06:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-29 09:53 pm (UTC)I'm uncomfortable with some of the game's content that involves children. I think that it's a very American (and to a lesser extent British) thing to stigmatize nudity so much, but there's blatantly fetishy content here that's right alongside what would usually just be a sign of an innocent, carefree environment.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-29 10:16 pm (UTC)