I stopped playing at the sliding box puzzle section, which is the point where I realised I really wasn't engaged with this game at all. The opening (as in, the first few minutes) implies some sort of darker metanarrative undercurrent, but the next two hours were, frankly, just a lot of filler and middling microgames.
The music is pretty good. The art is nice. The writing? You already know if you love it or hate it, it's in that particular style of random quirky referential humour with the occasional mention of anxiety or depression or other dark topic thrown in to juxtapose with the everything else. It didn't particularly work for me, mostly because the game's narrative feels aimless and lacking in direction, a big string of rooms connected with gags and one-bit characters who almost never have anything relevant to say.
You do, technically, have a clearly defined goal from very early on, but it feels mostly like an excuse for the plot to progress. This is the bad guy and his posse. You see them be bad guys for a minute or so. You decide you have to save the bad guy by finding his three estranged friends and making him good again. Now off you go to various themed worlds populated by extras who never have anything to say about the plot or the bad guy or the people you're trying to find. Score 50 points in this guy's minigame. Score 30 points in that guy's minigame. Do a side quest for the other guy (play their minigame). Flip some switches. Listen to these guys' anti-humour stand-up routine. Sometimes your companions will chime in with a pun or remark on their anxiety. And so on and so forth.
A lot of reviewers compare the game to Undertale, and I can see where they're coming from. But, if you look at the optional dialogue in Undertale or Deltarune, you'll see that a lot of it is actually relevant to the world, its characters, and what you're doing in it, even when the dialogue is setting up a joke. In Furquest, almost every dialogue is utterly irrelevant. It's all gags and jokes and bits and quips and references and fourth wall breaks, but they're so relentless that, for me, it quickly started to grate. It's not my style of comedy either, which I'm sure didn't help.
The microgames are hit or miss. It was the part of the game I was most excited for, thinking they could offer a lot more variety than The Other Game's samey bullet hell style encounters, and, well, not really? You don't actually encounter enemies that often, so you don't get the hectic microgame treadmill of Warioware. Some of the games (like picking out the right frog) are so short that you'll spend more time entering and leaving combat than actually playing the minigame, while others (like the moon jump) are simultaneously trivially easy and a bit too long. It just didn't strike the right balance for me. Most of the microgames were very easy (except for the vaccum game, which I found absolutely impossible), but the rate at which you're playing them is so slow and the punishment for losing is so inconsequential that it takes all the stakes out of the enemy encounters. Going back to Undertale again, in that game losing an encounter means a game over and going back to the last save point. In Furquest, you lose about as much currency as you would have gained if you won, and then continuing on your merry way.
Maybe the game gets good later. Maybe it all comes together near the end, and I was just too impatient to see it. I was forcing myself to keep playing hoping the game would finally get me hooked, but my burning hate for sliding box puzzles filtered me and prompted me to write this dumb essay instead. Maybe sliding box puzzle enjoyers will have a better time and hit the gold vein the other reviewers enjoyed so much. I don't have the motivation to find out.
