Bloody Faerie – Review
Sometimes, games serve as think pieces. Games like Nier Automata, with its amazing call for sacrifice or the deep introspective psychology of Prey. Other times, game serve as art. Think about the recently released version of Assassin’s Creed, in which you don’t play as an assassin trying to hack and sneak your way through Egyptian times, nor as a human reliving his ancestor’s memories, but as a tourist walking around Egypt one last time before its society collapses. And then even more times, we have games that seem to serve no direct purpose other than as throwaway titles or bait for a specific group of people. Bloody Faerie is one of those titles, and the subject of today’s magnification.
Story
There isn’t a shred of a story in this game, it is built to be a YouTube-bait title. The game doesn’t even have a title screen or opening cinematic to show you, you get dropped into the action immediately. All you get is a bunch of weird looking enemies that attack you, that don’t have voice lines to give any information about the world, history, or anything else betraying a story. This is of course the point, with no story there is nothing to distract people that watch dubbed over videos about whatever Leafy is shitting on today.
Graphics
Based on the CS:GO engine, the graphics of Bloody Faerie are pretty similar to those titles. Everything from the way the playable character holds his guns and knife to the look and feel of the menus, everything is just a copy of CS:GO. And that seems to be the point. Games that bait YouTubers into playing them need something familiar that draws in an audience. Something moving to keep the audience occupied without being so new and distracting that it detracts from the commentary.
The map seems to be randomly generated, with a couple of standard features that repeat every so often. There are some graveyards that you can find, although we found a half-buried UFO once, but other than that there is nothing remarkable about the trees. Much like Minecraft the map seems to be unending, after spending about 20 minutes running straight in one direction. Besides these features all you will find is the occasional hill and the same set of generic trees repeating over and over again. Otherwise there is nothing interesting to the map, which is to its detriment, because the enemies are all a set of magical creatures that stand out really badly among the normal trees.
Sound
Here’s an overview of all of the sounds that you get when you play Bloody Faerie. The generic clicking of your gun, the curious sound of sewer water when it rains in-game and the same repetitive sounds of the pegai and unicorns. That’s the three sorts of sounds you’ll hear. There’s some generic cricket noise when there is no rain, but that is all you’re going to get from this title. As mentioned before, there needs to be enough to make it interesting but nothing big to distract from the personality that you’re watching the content of.
Gameplay
Bloody Faerie is a first person shooter, wave after wave of the same pool of six enemies come for the player and it is your job to survive as long as you can while killing the onslaught of enemies. Players can pick up weapons from the randomly spawned locations on the map.. Per structure you will find one weapon, and a couple of clips, that don’t have to match said weapon. On top of the weapons you can find on the map you start out with seven shots of your handgun, and a bowie knife, similar to your starting loadout in a game of Counter Strike.
As you kill your enemies you will end the wave. Usually at about four enemies left the countdown starts, urging you to survive for a minute before the new wave starts. With each new wave a boss spawns that will drop a magic egg, which you can spend on a buying new weapons, ammo, or extra maximum health. If you want to keep out of the action, you can run around and look for ammo in some of the locations mentioned before, but otherwise you’re going to pretty much have to buy the ammo.
Conclusion
Games that pander to such a specific audience usually have such a small niche that when you don’t use them in that specific way, they become practically useless. We would argue that games like these should be distributed through different channels, as they’re often not meant to be played as games, but as background for whatever story the personality wants to deliver. Without any engaging mechanics, or even a story, we can hardly call Bloody Faerie a game, art, or even an experience. Though there is very little of it, it has value, but not unless you really need something dull to play.
Bloody Faerie - Review,
No Comments