Conditions for inclusion:

• -The player character must be consistently a fox; the fox must not be merely a skin or a character optiond
  
  
• -Must have 100% working Steam achievements
  
  
• -Must not be a visual novel

Game #27: FixFox

"In the past, humans used to look normal. Later, some got spliced with animal genes. Because it was cool. But then, Earth's climate changed... so everyone got spliced. Because it was cold. Animal fur keeps humans warm now. But they also inherited the ability to hibernate from animals. Now we can dare to delve far into the depths of space, sleeping. That's the job of a SPACR - A specially trained space mechanic."

You play as Vix, a SPACR employee on the verge of getting fired for poor performance. The management is willing to give you one last chance – a risky mission to a faraway planet called Karamel, to fix the beacon base and re-establish communications. Despite the hangups of your hypochondriac AI companion and your history with radiation sickness, you set off on your deep-space voyage, unaware that you'll have to fix more than just a few broken machines to get back home.

So... Yeah, I just got tricked into playing a visual novel.

This game advertises itself as a puzzle/adventure game, but almost all the “puzzles” are braindead easy, serving only as padding to pace out the story beats. Even with the main “fixing stuff” mechanic, the only difficulty you’ll encounter is “Oops, your inventory doesn’t have the right material to finish this job, time to backtrack to who-knows-where!”

The gameplay is a muddled mess. It introduces about 20 different gameplay elements, and then proceeds to do nothing profound or compelling with any of them over the game’s 12-hour runtime. The overworld feels like a soulless randomly-generated junkyard of obstacles filled with copy-and-paste robot NPCs. Loot collection is a nothing sandwich of the same few repeating items. There are even about 5 redundant kinds of fast travel. (I once found myself hopping around to activate fast travel points – by using a different type of fast travel to hop between them. I really had to stop for a moment and ask myself what I was doing!)

Looking back, I think I had more fun discovering all the quirky gameplay elements for the first time, which felt fitting for the game’s offbeat, Undertale-like sense of humor. Unfortunately, about 3 hours in, the game runs out of new ideas to show off, and it becomes an absolute chore to spend the rest of the game retreading things you’ve already seen.

Still, I almost don't want to describe too much. I feel like it hits harder if you go in with no expectations.

One thing I absolutely must criticize, however: the game-breaking bugs. I ran into, no joke, about 20 softlocks while playing through normally. There seems to be an issue with the “delivery drones” mechanic where they will get stuck somewhere offscreen and never finish the delivery, freezing the camera in place forever. If you’re in the ideal mentality for the game – a fox mechanic who solves problems – you might find some workarounds for a few of the softlocks. (After some experimentation, I found you can unfreeze the camera by using your sleeping bag!) Other bugs, such as one which fades the screen to black forever, have no workaround except for Alt+F4 and hoping there was an autosave recently. It’s really quite awful.

Aside from the gameplay? Graphics are serviceable, but nothing special. Music is catchy, and Vix has a fantastic leitmotif that works its way into many other tracks.

But the writing… yeah, it’s kind of phenomenal. I have some major respect for whoever wrote the scenario and dialogue. A good VN is one that goes for the emotional jugular, and FixFox masterfully hit home, at least to me, on at least a half-dozen occasions. Again, I’m not going to spoil too much, but you can expect a quirky, heartwarming story about AI ethics, unfixable problems, and acceptance.

As a puzzle-adventure game, I’d rate this a 2 / 10 – pretty much all “gameplay” was abysmal. But as a visual novel, I’d say it hit a 7 / 10 on the scale of emotional heights. And because of that, I’m highly recommending it. And to the dev, I say: I really want to see another game from you, and I challenge you to make a really compelling puzzle game to go along with the story next time. I get the feeling you can do much better than this.

(Achievement hunters: Enjoy the story, put up with the dull gameplay, and it’s a simple and straightforward 100% in 10-12 hours.)

An absolutely adorable game that I would highly recommend, I played the demo on next fest and knew I had to get it.