The last few years have reminded us that many countries’ health systems are in poor shape. Still, the challenges facing health care workers are hard to understand if you’re not a health care worker. Fall of Porcupine aims to do this in an approachable way by putting the player in her 2D animal doctor’s scrubs. Unfortunately, Critical Rabbit’s latest release isn’t the hard-hitting medical drama wrapped up in a fluffy waffle blanket like we’d hoped. This cute game has so much potential, but it needed a lot more attention and a focused narrative to really make the leap.
From full beds to alternative medicine to corporate hospital management, a huge amount of research and interviews has gone into the game’s long-awaited commentary. It’s a pity that the results of the research result in a flat story with a repetitive mechanics. You control Finley, an anthropomorphic pigeon and new doctor at St. Ursula Hospital in the town of Porcupine. When you’re taking care of your patients, your boss, Dr. Crokowski the white cheetah, always doesn’t have a very good impression of you. His colleague, a novice doctor, a suspicious janitor, a family doctor, and many other characters in the form of various animals will appear.
Fall of Porcupine is primarily a 2D side-scrolling game with some light platforming elements. Play Finley’s Work, Life and Dreams and use your in-game phone to access your tasks. This also stores a record of the cast and text her messages from before the game started. These texts seemed to suggest a broader story, and it’s a shame none of them lead anywhere.
The story moves slowly through the first two-thirds, packed with lengthy scenes of Finley talking to a vending machine and mocking his boss through a single pigeon play. Every time something interesting happened, we got up, leaned over the screen, and thought: now These dramatic moments end in unexpected climactic developments, diverge, or disappear altogether.
The satisfying narrative is interspersed with mini-games, mostly involving Finley making hospital rounds. Better yet, color matching puzzles, Wardle. However, many of them aren’t even minigames, such as pressing multiple buttons at once with unnatural finger rotation postures, or “solving” difficult riddles by talking to neighbors until they tell you the answer. just request. In some cases, there is even turn-based combat. When it’s your turn, the puzzle is given a grade of A, B, or C, which does not affect the patient’s diagnosis.
Choices can be made throughout the game in dialogue options and other small actions (take the bus or walk), but it’s not clear if that affects friendship levels or story arcs. Of course, not everything has to be like that, but in a game like this, it’s important to understand how your choices affected the outcome and, if so, how the outcome feels inconsistent. I wanted to know if I could.
For a small town, Porcupine has a large population. They don’t say much, but they talk a lot. Their motives are often inexplicable and their behavior is inconsistent. As a result, it becomes difficult for them to empathize when they are in trouble. There are also emotional events, but that means I knew I should feel sad rather than sad. Feeling real sorrow. The story was full of fluff and I didn’t understand when something emotionally significant came along.
Fall of Porcupine suffers from some performance issues on Switch as well. There is no manual way to save the game and very few autosaves. The game froze several times and I had to restart it. There are other fine scratches. Dialogue played twice for him, erratic font sizes, screens moving away from Finley, and characters who were supposed to follow Finley often got stuck on the stairs. Issues like this can be fixed afterward, but between headaches and scratches, it was a test of patience to get past the frustrating moments of repeating already-repeated plays.
The core of Fall of Porcupine is its cute art style. A 2D paintbrush look reminiscent of Night in the Woods and A Short Hike. These artists know how to use the color wheel and use it to bring the atmosphere of Porcupine and St. Ursula to life. The rainy nights are freezing, the colorful weekends are happy, and the white walls of the hospital are clean and clinical.
If the visual style is at the heart of Fall of Porcupine, the music is its brain. The soundtrack mixes folk rock, slow-paced acoustic sounds, and dark dramatic atmospheres to promote the atmosphere of the game. That is, when it is heard. I found that wearing headphones gave the best effect, otherwise the volume was too loud and I could hear a hissing sound coming from the speakers. Sound effects such as crashes, screams, and thunder also helped stabilize the scene.
Thanks also to Critical Rabbit for including the trigger warning at the start of the game. There are also accessibility settings such as dyslexia mode and color mode to help players. It’s always nice to see games that include these options and highlight potential triggers.
After playing with other indie games that did similar things by far, including difficult themes (Spiritfarer), strong storytelling (Night in the Woods, Beacon Pines), and gameplay (Stardew Valley), Fall of Porcupine ” is hard to give a very positive review. The art and music are outstanding, but not enough to make up for the uneven story and gameplay. It is recommended to play this game only after exhausting the pleasant games mentioned above. And so are other games not on the list that you may have purchased but not yet played.
Conclusion
Porcupine’s fall has a lot of potential, but it’s not enough for our diagnosis. The cute art style and evocative soundtrack are the main draws, and while the wide-eyed animals can hide the dark themes of the unhealthy system, they completely obscure the haphazard story or You can’t attract players. We felt the game needed either a stronger narrative thread or more complex gameplay to improve the state of the game. Performance bugs can be fixed with patches, but curing the ailments of “Fall of Porcupine” requires more than bandages.
