Faye Falling Steam Charts & Stats

A delightful, emotional, story-driven game with light JRPG and shoot 'em up elements. The presentation is simply superb, boasting beautiful pixel-art graphics, sombre music, and a fair smattering of evocative, poetic prose. On this basis, the game is an easy recommendation, and the developer, easily praised! Great work! The gameplay, on the other hand, excites less enthusiasm. The RPG mechanics are quite shallow, and the balance of combat... the tools given to the player and the enemies... feels all over the place. For example, enemies capable of inflicting status effects are infinitely more bothersome than those who are not, and pickpocketing is an infuriating dice roll unless one happens to pick the class that can [i]simply ignore it.[/i] Actually, granting the player the ability to dodge every direct attack may be at the root of these issues — the mix of avoidable and unavoidable damage in the game as it currently is simply feels awkward, at least to me. At any rate, though, combat is so easy that this is all easily overlooked. Though, on the subject of difficulty... (As the section below covers NEW GAME PLUS, it is of little concern to prospective buyers; however, I hope Jack Astral himself stumbles upon this!) [b]Challenge Mode[/b] is unlocked upon the game's completion, and serves to increase the difficulty and add some additional lore items to find. Splendid idea! Alas, its implementation pleases me very little, indeed. To address the elephant in the room, it's... not challenging whatosever. In fact, the differences between it, and Normal Mode are not clear to me at all. Or was it that I picked a different, stronger class? Secondly, despite being a dedicated NG+ mode, Challenge Mode does nothing to alleviate that the bulk of the game involves easy puzzles, separated by cutscenes. [i]Lots[/i] of cutscenes, with underwhelming functionality around skipping through them! Between that and the low difficulty, I found my second playthrough to be an unfortunate drag. One final topic, and my greatest pet peeve with the game: Backtracking! While backtracking in a game like this is perfectly fine, and the game's design facilitates it well, the [i]interactivity[/i] of the world serves to undermine its immersion! There are so many characters whose dialogue ceases to make sense past a certain point in the protagonist's journey, and it's jarring to see them remain while certain other NPCs move on. [spoiler] Why does the protagonist ignore the fading spirits found earlier on in the game, when they interact with those in the Sky? [/spoiler] [spoiler] Why does that one Dark Spirit reply to Vesper, long after their departure? [/spoiler] While this is a most petty complaint, it is exactly what I would expected a game like this to excel at, not to mention being something that I hope could be addressed with a relatively small effort in an update :) In conclusion: I salute thee, Jack Astral, stranger though thou art, and thank thee for thy work. [b]I recommend this video game.[/b]