Fe

Official site

Fe is a game about nature, exploration, beauty and danger. Most crucially to me, it’s a game about helping others and taking joy in the environment. A note on the title, which is confusing to most English speakers: The developers are from Sweden, and in Swedish fe means fairy.

You control a small creature that to me is best described as a cross between a fox, a squirrel and a porcupine; you have a sharp inquisitive snout, quickly learn to scamper up trees, and have prickly-looking fur with fashionable frosted tips. In classic metroidvania fashion, at first your options to traverse the world are limited, but soon you learn to do things like sprout a membrane allowing you to glide. The beginning feels almost frustratingly constrained, but this does serve to increase the feeling of freedom and joy once things start opening up.

The world is populated by creatures large and small, most of which are neutral to you, until you’ve learned their language and harmonised with them, at which point they become friendly and even actively helpful. The threat in the world comes mostly from strange, artificial golem-like creatures that are going around trapping all the animals in weird goopy nets. One of the most fun activities for me was finding ways to thwart their attempts, breaking their nets, sneaking around them, hiding in conveniently-placed tufts of grass, and occasionally even leading them into the paths of larger animals such as bearlike creatures that can make short work of the interlopers.

I think it’s interesting to contrast Fe against Ori and the Blind Forest. Both games have you piloting a cute little creature around a beautiful world. However, Ori is filled with hostile creatures that need to be killed for resources. Despite the beauty of the world, things are fundamentally hostile to you in most cases. In Fe, on the other hand, you go around and sing to the plants and beasts you encounter, triggering various effects. I find the latter vastly more interesting.

Similarly to Gorogoa and Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it almost feels like a waste to have bought this for the Switch, because the gorgeous art design and animation really shine on a big screen, and I prefer to tote the Switch around rather than plug it in. Then again, there’s definitely something to be said for being able to just sit down wherever and get lost in a quick session of exploration.

One of the things I like most about Fe is the sense of scale it invokes with some of the creatures you encounter, to the point that you actually need to scale some of them to be able to communicate with them at eye level. They bring to mind the majesty of the colossi in Shadow of the Colossus (intentionally, no doubt), but without the terrible burden of being tasked to destroy them.

I have not finished the game yet but I’m always very happy to encounter a game that lets me explore a beautiful and interesting world without being about destroying and despoiling either it or its inhabitants.

Far Cry 2 and 5 comparison

Far Cry 2 is one of my favourite games of all time due to many reasons, but the main reason is just how real and situated it feels. In a landscape of power fantasies and chest-high cover walls, the uncompromising shittiness of Far Cry 2’s world is all the more powerful. The guns jam, healing yourself involves gruesome animations like pushing a bullet through your bicep or popping your arm back into its socket, and your buddies are 1) shitty people trying to destabilise a country that’s already in the midst of self-immolation and 2) not infinitely-respawning bullet dispensories, but actually likely to die from adrenaline overdoses if you get them in too deep. And this is not even mentioning the crippling malaria episodes that you have to alleviate with an ever-dwindling supply of drugs. Paradoxically, being underpowered can be a much more powerful feeling than being a bad-ass.

The game remains in my eyes the absolute pinnacle of systemic cohesiveness, and that’s saying something in a world in which Zelda: Breath of the Wild exists. There’s virtually no UI, with things like the map and the compass being actual in-game objects you need to look down at (especially hazardous while driving). Fire spreads, dependent on the wind. Bushes bend and crunch as you step through them. There’s nothing like enemy higlighting, body looting or suchlike. It’s just the world, as you see it, running at its own rate and largely uninterested in you.

The game’s most well-known designer is probably Clint Hocking, who also worked on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, one of the all-time greatest sneak-em-ups. Here’s a great video of him playing through a level of that game.

Anyway, all this was mostly an excuse to post this video.