Fall of Porcupine Review (Trickster)
Long story short:
This is not a terrible game. It's fine. I just would not recommend that you spend a whole lot of money to play it. The game feels unfinished, and borrows too heavily from Night in the Woods.
Long Story:
Fall of Porcupine, according to the devs, was supposed to be a love letter to heath care workers. I didn't come away with that feeling after playing through the game. What I came away with was a rushed and (I am sorry to say) uninspired attempt to replicate the game play experience of Night in the Woods. More precisely, the team borrowed five qualities from NITWs gameplay and story
1) The setting:
An old declining town past it's prime. The residents have a love/hate relationship with it. The player is encouraged to explore and learn more about the residents. In NITWs, the player had a lot to do and explore. Lots of optional content, and plenty of other NPCs to learn and get to know. Exploring the city and engaging
with the town NPCs was part of the fun.
In Fall of Porcupine, there isn't much to do in the city. Sure, you can explore, but there isn't much to find. And there is, as far as I can tell, no serious optional content to take on. The NPCs also do not have anything interesting to say. Really, it's a lot of dead air. The only thing you really do is walk from your house to the
hospital. Ugh!
2) The changing of seasons:
This sounds silly. But both games begin with the onset of fall and use this as a thematic element. In NITWs, the main character had dropped out of college and was struggling to find a pathway into adulthood. She was transitioning into a new "Season of Life".
FOP attempts to portray this as well, but it feels out of place. Our main character is a med school grad and has a nice job at a hospital. Sure, the hospital is old and declining, but our main character choose to work there. As far as we know, he could have gone anywhere. His boss is a pain in the neck at first, but he is going to have to join the club on that one.
3) Relationship simulation:
In addition to the main story, there are junctures where the main character selects one of the side characters to spend time with and learn more about. In NITWs, we get to learn more about these side characters, develop our relationship with them, and these side stories weave their way into the main story.
In FOP, we kind of get to learn more about the side characters, but you don't get much in the way of relationship simulation. What you do get to learn about these side characters is not particuraly interesting. Moreover, these side stories do not have much relevance to the main story. (Disclosure: I only played through the "Karl" route).
The patient interactions were a missed opportunity. The game treats your relationship with the patients as an afterthought. This could have been some great relationship simulation. The relationship between doctors and patients hasn't been explored much in games. There was potential for some emotional weight here, but the devs were too fixated on using the NITWs template.
4) Minigames
I won't go into comparisons here. As many, many others have pointed out, there isn't much of a point to the minigames in FOP. Some of them are broken, others are impossible on a controller.
5) The art style
The art style in FOP is quite nice! But again, it is more or less a replica of NITW. It is great that they captured the look and feel of NITWs graphics. But the inherent risk in doing that is that you invite comparisons to a very well-received game.
I won't go any further on my gripes with the game (the music, characters, and setting), and I don't want to knock the creators too hard. They do seem like a sweet group of people with good intentions. And this game is not terrible. I think the lesson learned is that you need to make your own game - this game feels like it used NITWs as a template. And if you draw inspiration from other sources, you need to find ways to mix things up and make it your own. There was a lot of potential here.