From Woodsy Studio comes
Echoes of the Fey – Episode 0: The Immolation. This is a free to play casual indie novel, with science fiction and fantasy tones.
Released earlier in 2017, this is a free stand alone chapter in the
Echoes of the Fey series, taking you through the story of Sofya Rykov, and how she became the survivor she is in the full series. This is purely an introduction to the series for the players, and also provides backstory for the players of Episodes 1 and 2.
When I first downloaded this, I thought this was going to be a fantasy novel, not a point and click sci-fi adventure game with choices, and I was really shocked. This game offered a lot more than I previously thought upon downloading, and it seemed to be a really good game. Unfortunately, there was a lot of lag that really ruined the game for me. It took ages to get through loading screens, and speeches, and I ended up spamming the skip button so that it would actually move through and not constantly crash. It was a real struggle to get through this and complete it.
The characters are really good, their designs are well done, especially the prisoners. Their personalities are all wondrous, and I found I really liked one of two of them. They were well developed, three dimensional characters that are easy to almost connect with and feel for. The story line was well developed as well, although it felt slightly rushed, and I was a little breathless trying to keep up. I felt like rather than trying to flesh the story out, Woodsy Studio just wanted people to know the backstory as quickly as possible so they could move on with their original story line, and that was a real shame. The audio is well done, this has a really good soundtrack, and I would be interested in a free download for it on the Store.
The achievements are all easy enough to collect, and only require two play throughs if you use the saving mechanism. The other fault I have here is that you have to click escape in order to reach the settings menu – a small button for the settings on screen would have been better. It took me forever to figure out how to get to settings, and was too anxious to try the Esc button in case it quit out of the game. A simple small settings button would have been much easier to use.
Unfortunately, this is a relatively low rating from me, because I just couldn’t enjoy it from the horrendous lagging that also lagged my whole computer out. It wasn’t a bad game, it was really well done, but this isn’t something I’d be interested in playing again, nor does it make me want to discover the rest of the series – as a free stand alone, isn’t that it’s purpose? To try and get the player to want to play the rest of the series?
Well done, but it really could have been done better in some aspects.
2.5