Very Vile Fairy File

I'm writing this review a few days after finishing Very Vile Fairy File, which normally I'm opposed to. I find that my memory very quickly muddies after the credits roll, and in some cases I even keep the game open while I write in case there's a mechanic I want to make sure I'm describing properly. In this case, however, had I written this review immediately after I gave up playing and read to the end of the walkthrough, I'd have just taken a bit, steaming poo all over it, which isn't really what Very Vile deserves. I'll explain in a bit.

Very Vile Fairy File is a wordplay puzzle adventure, as one should expect from Andrew Schultz. This time around, rhymes are the name of the game, which I found both more intuitive and more rewarding than the spoonerisms and anagrams of the author's other titles I've tried. Environmental description is minimal, but that means almost everything you see can be incorporated into a puzzle, and I still found my imagination working with what little set dressing there is. A lot of time and effort has also been put into acknowledging rhymes aside from the intended solution; if it's acceptable in Scrabble, the game will probably give you a witty retort and golf-clap your cleverness.

...Therefore, it's baffling how buggy the current release is. Now, I'll fully admit this may be my own fault: I play IF exclusively in-browser on a low-end laptop, and it's very possible that I could have avoided the issues I'm about to complain about if I just downloaded the thing, or played in a different interpreter. Maybe I'm due to clear my cache, or maybe itch.io is doing something funky to the file, I don't know. My point is, the seemingly most up-to-date version of the game as it is currently available to play had some non-gameplay issues that ultimately ruined my enjoyment, and they might happen to you, too.

First, and most crucially, the save feature is broken. Trying to save or restore a session would freeze the entire game, and only a full page refresh would fix it. The game isn't very long, so I eventually decided I'd just finish it all in one go, but that was only after having to restart the whole thing something like four times. The first few puzzle solutions are now going to occupy valuable space in my brain for the rest of my life. What made me quit completely, though, was a moment right at the end. I had run the gauntlet, explored every nook and cranny and was feeling quite smug about my poetic memetics...(Spoiler - click to show)when I died by being too hasty to enter the gate to the final area. Oh well, that's all part of the genre, and the warnings were pretty clearly signposted. Just type undo.

Whoops! Undo didn't just go back to my last turn; it dropped me at the halfway point of the plot, with no clue which of the mid-game puzzles I had to go back and do over. It was at this point I decided that I wasn't having enough fun to justify a fifth playthrough, and just read the cheat sheet to see how everything ended.

If Very Vile Fairy File had worked for me as intended, it would get a hearty recommendation. As it stands, so long as you go in knowing not to trust the system commands and you're a big Dr. Seuss fan, it's still probably worth your time. I'll be playing the rest of the series, because I do like the central wordplay gimmick, but I don't know if I'll ever trust an undo feature again.