Review of The Feeble Files by Doom

So you are a talented adventure developer with a superpower to switch between genres to equally great results (Elvira / Simon the Sorcerer / Call of Cthulhu), whose entire family has been in this business since the early 1980s. And you decide to create a dystopian satire of Brazil or They Live proportions years before it becomes a reality in the 21st century. And you come up with a brave new world populated by stereotypical aliens and ruled by a powerful OmniBrain who orders everyone to be happy under a threat of extermination, who sees almost every action as some violation and inspires citizens to report neighbors and even themselves. The background is so reach that you even feel a need to include a big in-game encyclopedia which grows twice at one point.

The story is equally long, both grim and funny, characters are lovable and voiced by the famous British comics, satire - effective. Not to mention some brilliantly complex multi-step puzzles that obviously took a lot of time to design. So why, instead of joining instant classics such as Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Grim Fandango and The Adventures of Woodruff, this game got a reputation of an instant disaster? Because, as it seems, AdventureSoft went to all the trouble to create the most unfriendly and sadistic gaming experience, breaking every rule, just like Feeble does (don’t hesitate to check the extending list of “crimes” he commits for more laughs - that is, if you dare to play the game).

It is slow, VERY slow. The cumbersome Feeble slowly walks through locations with fewer hot spots than in some of the most recent walking sims, running fetch quests and hunting pixels. Then you’ll get to play as two equally slow characters at once, navigating them through empty jungle screens that scroll in all directions - hours and hours of pointless walking. There’s also at least one moment when the game freezes without warning and asks for a slow replay. And wait for a time loop sequence that extends to a whole level with every wrong step leading to an instant replay.

Puzzle solving is made even worse by the atrocious interface based around ORACLE - a portable computer where both the inventory and the aforementioned encyclopedia are stored in two separate and very tiny windows (think Nintendo DS), as well as several ugly cursor icons that look near identical, with the “use item” command resetting as soon as you click on something. But even if you get used to this traumatic experience, you are in for a surprise as somewhere in the middle of the road you’ll have to complete a bunch of VERY annoying mini-games without saving in-between…

There’s a big chance you’d uninstall Feeble by this point. Which is a shame, because what follows is one of the most beautifully constructed logic puzzles that requires you to figure out a complex code. And, of course, a rendezvous with SAM - the funniest killer robot you’ll ever meet. The rest of the game has more cutscenes than the actual gameplay if I remember correctly. Yes, I did manage to beat it when I was younger, just to prove myself something, but I’m not ready to repeat it today and can’t recommend Feeble to anyone. It just hates me, us, all adventurers for no reason. Maybe it was some special way of warning us of OmniBrain? Wink-wink.

Read the review »

Time Played: Over 20 hours
Difficulty: Very Hard