[h1]FoxMania: The Quest To Review All Fox Games On Steam![/h1]
[i]Conditions for inclusion:
[list]
[*] -The player character must be consistently a fox; the fox must not be merely a skin or a character option
[*] -Must have 100% working Steam achievements
[*] -Must not be a visual novel
[/list][/i]
[b]Game #46: Kitt’s Quest[/b]
Not to be confused with [i]Kit’s Quest[/i], a collect-a-thon platformer I already reviewed on this list.
So, this game is clearly an amateur project, feels like a Krystal the Fox fangame, that somehow made it over the finish line. And hey, I can respect that, considering how many projects of this caliber never make it so far. But yeah, this is a finished game – 11 levels, 11 boss fights, optional collectibles, upgrades, end credits, a “normal” ending and a “true” ending, and even alternate costumes with perks.
That’s mostly where the positives end.
So, what exactly is this game? I would call it a platformer with some light collect-a-thon and brawler elements. You’re dropped into large open-world levels where you can wander around looking for items and beating up enemies. Unfortunately, the graphics and physics both feel like they’re straight out of an unpolished N64 game.
I cannot stress enough just how [i]unplayable[/i] the first 10 hours of this game are. You start out obnoxiously weak and fragile, and you have to collect 10 of the large purple crystals hidden in levels in order to get more HP, mana reserves, and attack power. Most of the crystals require later upgrades to collect. I love giving everything a chance, and I love playing the unplayable and living to tell the tale, but this game [i]really[/i] gave me a test of patience like no other. I had to dig deep into my inner masochist to keep going.
There’s a lives system, but no mid-level checkpoints. Die, and you restart the entire level over again, every time, even on the soul-crushingly long levels. So what’s the lives system even for? Well… the lives system is SPECIFICALLY for collecting 100% small gems in a level. That’s it. If you used a life, then the gems you collected stay collected when you die. Gems don’t even stay collected when you beat a level; you have to collect them all in one go. (The lives don’t even save the large purple crystals you collect – you know, the important things that make you stronger. It’s only for the run where you’re specifically going for all the small gems.)
The camera can rotate, but it’s fixed at a downward angle pointed at the main character, so you can never see very far into the distance, except during some of the boss fights which unexpectedly change how the camera behaves (which also messes with the character’s controls, since you move relative to the camera). There’s absolutely no attempt made to detect wall collision with the camera – the camera can just freely pass through walls all the time, anytime.
This is a platformer, but there isn’t a jump button. Instead, walking off a ledge lets you walk on the air for a moment, and if you happen to walk onto another platform, you don’t fall. This is about as weird and janky as it sounds, especially when it comes to walking down slopes. You can’t walk down slopes. You walk on air, then fall down, over and over again, like invisible stairs. And this was just considered okay.
There's a mana system, and you learn new spells as you clear levels, which help with combat and puzzle solving. Mana reserves always felt woefully inadequate. You only have enough mana for maybe a dozen uses of the most basic spell. I always felt like I was running out, until very late in the game when I collected enough crystals for a decent reserve.
I don’t know if this was specifically a problem with my system, but the magic and interact buttons seemed to get polled at the wrong frame rate – they only worked about half the time I pressed the button. This meant that I had to frantically mash the buttons anytime I wanted to use them. Super frustrating and stressful in precision situations, and very weird that the other buttons didn’t seem to have this issue, probably indicating bad coding.
The “fly” spell is awful. It propels you forward a very fixed distance, gives no indication of its distance besides trial and error, and can’t be cancelled once started. Activate it from the wrong distance, and you’ll likely fall to your death and have to start the entire level over.
Eventually, after I learned to handle the physics and I collected enough of the crystals not to immediately die to a single mistake, I’ll have to admit that I did start having some fun with the game. Some moments of cleverness to the design began to shine through, and some of the game’s puzzles were satisfying to solve. But they came very far past what I’d expect would be the limit of a normal person’s patience.
The final level and true ending are locked behind 100% completion, and the final level is a grueling headache like I’ve never seen before, filled with sudden-death moments and one-try puzzles, a challenge that someone with only the most incredible stubbornness can beat. Unfortunately, the achievement for collecting all the costumes doesn’t seem to unlock if the last one you collect is the secret one at the end of the true ending. I’d have to replay the whole game from scratch to test the theory, but as you might imagine, I’m not in a real hurry to try.
Overall… wow, that was an experience. I’ll probably be remembering this game for a while, just not for positive reasons. It’s a game that I’d really only recommend to gaming masochists, the kind like me who love to delve deeper just to see how weird things can really get.
And I do have to say it again – I have a lot of respect for a solo dev who can actually bring a project like this to completion. It takes a lot of work to get a game with this much playable content into this kind of playable state! Unfortunately, they’ll have to do a lot more focus testing, particularly on a better difficulty curve, if they want to make something with broader market appeal.
3 / 10.
