[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 #43: The Great Chicken Thief[/b]
[i](aka: Short Stories)[/i]
Oh joy, more shovelware. The store name is "Short Stories" for some bizarre reason. Perhaps the developer repurposed one of their apps and forgot to change both the store name and the library name.
This is an irritatingly difficult stealth-puzzle game. In each level, you must steal 5 chickens from a maze-like pen, running them back to your pickup truck one-at-a-time, while avoiding detection by 2-3 patrolling bull guards (which look suspiciously like two-legged cows with Bowser's head). You have the power to whistle and strategically distract the bulls, which proves necessary sometimes.
There are 6 working levels, and a 7th weird and broken demo level that ends with a message from the dev saying that they will add more levels soon. This was from 2022.
Most achievements appear to be broken. I spent a while restarting levels without failures and trying to get them to activate, but I only managed to get two achievements to do what they advertised.
Game's pretty hard. It took over an hour to figure out how to consistently beat some levels. AI has a lot of interesting quirks and cheeses to learn, and it's not trivial. The enemy vision cones are janky and have a tendency to snipe you from positions and distances that feel like utter bull, pun intended.
There's one single music track that plays constantly from the moment you turn the game on.
If I had anything positive to say, it's that surprisingly, I actually somewhat enjoyed the gameplay. There's something really satisfying about finding the safe zones, learning the patterns, figuring out the AI quirks, and pulling off the perfect chicken heist after an hour of practice and experimentation. Also, the store-bought assets weren't half bad. The fox model had some nice animations and personality, and there's a hilarious animation at the end of each level where all the chickens spill out of the truck as the fox tries to drive away.
Unfortunately, like a lot of shovelware of this kind, it lacks far too much polish to be taken seriously as a game. At the very minimum, it needs a level select and more levels with a better difficulty curve. Getting the achievements fixed would also be nice.
3 / 10.
