Eye on iOS: Volume 8
Fetch
Merlina McGovern
The word “fetch” may bring to mind sunny days in backyards with happy dogs and their owners playing together, but the creators of the Drawn series at Big Fish Studios have taken the simple, homespun concept of a boy and his dog and dropped it into a futuristic world filled with canine-napping robots, evil corporate masterminds, and lots and lots of arcade games. As you’d expect from these developers, Fetch provides a wildly imaginative world to explore in this charming story, but unlike their previous offerings, this time you’ll also be left panting from some madly infuriating arcade minigames that can be more annoying than a bad case of fleas.
In a city with obvious dystopian overtones, cranes and diggers work to move large piles of junk around against the blinking neon signs of the ubiquitous Embark Corporation. The company’s evilness isn’t too subtle, with a motto like “One World – Our World,” and its advertisements litter the landscape with promises of better products, like the Ball, version 3.0, “Now 30% more round.” Tapping around the environment will animate advertisements, newspapers that say “alert” when you touch a story, and missing dog posters that bark at you.
It isn’t long before you encounter your first arcade game. It turns out that in addition to making canine products and marketing itself as man’s new best friend, Embark is also conducting a weeklong celebration of video games, giving away prizes when you play an arcade game and win. The first one, “Alien Shooter,” is pretty simple. You’re equipped with a laser and must tap the screen to shoot aliens and meteors, trying to survive five waves of play. It’s easy, and you’re rewarded with a squirt gun that doesn’t actually have any use beyond providing an excuse to open up its box and virtually pop bubble wrap.
Your early idle wanderings come to an abrupt end when you happen upon a fire hydrant with glowing green eyes that opens up and swallows first your dog, and then you. And so begins your trip down the rabbit hole, or rather sewer pipe, as you start your search through a brilliantly whimsical world for your missing pup named Bear.
Once out of the bowels of the city you’ll travel over brilliant blue oceans filled with pirate ships and submarines, to tropical islands brimming with a riot of colorful parrots and odd, yellow coconut-eating birds, and to industrial towns filled with scaffolding, gears, and strobe lights. With the iPad’s retina display, shining moonlight from a radiant orb pops off the screen against a velvet indigo night sky filled with sparkles. The cartoony style depicts a grim vision of the future, but in a fairly innocuous way that’s almost a bit subversive. Despite the evil corporation lurking in the background, you’ll be surrounded by bright colors and childlike images like three blind mice scampering with black sunglasses, tapping their tiny canes, juxtaposed against sewers dripping in green ooze and filled with grinning and chattering skulls.
Much of the music that fills this world is ambient/electronic in nature. It’s more of a soothing background accompaniment than anything. Most objects you interact with provide a variety of effects like plinks, zaps, dings, crashes, barks, yips, and more. The protagonist sounds like a very darling little boy, but he speaks very little, mostly calling out for Bear. There are robotic voices warning you away from off-limits areas, and as you wander in the belly of the Embark Corporation, you’ll hear a disembodied, soothing female voice praising workers for days without accidents.
The somewhat slow-witted robotic workers do what they can to keep you away from the company’s main complex. To outwit them, you must overcome the odd inventory or logic obstacle. Anytime you pick up an object like a saw or a key, you’ll immediately use it – you won’t have to carry items around and figure out when and where to use them. The few logic puzzles are extremely easy as well. Need to play an organ? Just follow the lighted clues – no musicality or even memory required. Have to figure out a passcode? The image for the code is right in front of you.
While the puzzles are definitely not the focus of Fetch, exploring will provide a variety of opportunities to obtain achievements, which for me upped the replay value of the game (I will get all of those dog tags some day, dag nab it!). Said tags belong to other dogs that have also been stolen. The dog tags aren’t always in easy-to-spot places, of course. You’ll have to interact with the world around you, search high and low, tapping here, there and everywhere. You’ll also earn achievements for discovering secret places and for reaching certain accomplishments within the minigames you encounter.
You’ll have plenty of occasion to do the latter, as you must win money from a variety of arcade games to purchase items from vending machines or pay off rogue robots. Fetch is billed as an adventure/arcade game, and though the introduction of arcade elements is slow at first, as you move forward you’ll need to play more and more to make any progress. In fact, the two final acts are essentially a pair of extended arcade games. The first one requires a bit of puzzling as well, as you’ll use a laser to not only fight aliens but also to turn on computers and assemble robots as you travel through a history and imagination museum.
Upon completing this, you’ll encounter what is essentially one long platforming exercise, where you’ll tap to gain elevation and swipe to speed your spaceship up. There’s a life bar that reduces every time you run into an obstacle, a robot, bombs, falling crates, and all manner of other nasty obstructions. I found the controls to be a bit hairy; often, with what I thought was a light tap, my ship would go rocketing up right into a spinning saw or not move down or out of the way in time. In fact, it was so frustrating that I nearly gave up, even though I knew I was near the end of the journey. Given that it took me 30 minutes to complete it out of 2½ hours of total play, this sequence was enough to nearly wipe out my enjoyment of the game.
In between a walk in the park and hair-pulling frustration, the variety of minigames will have you swiping cannons from side to side to shoot pirates and collect hearts (if you’re ancient like me, it’s very reminiscent of the Atari 2600 game Kaboom!) or swiping tasty fish into a rainbow snake’s mouth while also tapping bombs and undesirable food out of the way. The majority of minigames hit the right level of difficulty to keep me entertained and challenged throughout.
Aside from the endgame headache, Fetch is a pleasant journey through a crazy sci-fi world where a little boy battles his way through obstacles for love of a dog. You’ll learn that that fierce loyalty between animal and owner is enough to propel folks through all kinds of crazy scenarios, moving them to concoct bizarre schemes and to overcome amazing hurdles. Available exclusively for iPad, its heart-warming story filled with highly polished graphics and funny interactivity was enough to keep this adventure/arcade mutt in my good graces and charm me into playing it again.
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