Fairest

Fairest
by Amanda Walker profile

fantasy
2022

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

A twisted mashup of fairy tales with light but engaging puzzles, April 12, 2022

by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 1 hour

This game manages to strike a fine balance between puzzle and story, giving fairly easy puzzles with a lot of 'oh, I know where this goes but I can't use it yet' moments. It reminds me of Ryan Veeder's work in that way.

This game is a mashup of many fairytales, including the 'three brothers' theme, three challenges, and stories like Snow White, Rapunzel, the musicians of Bremen, and many of the lesser-known Grimm's Fairytales.

It decides to show the darker side of many of these, with the darkest presented as exactly in the books. One lean I felt uncomfortable with was (Spoiler - click to show)the option to marry a prepubescent girl, but after reading the notes and remembering the original tales there's a good chance that was in the original stories.

The game has an interesting relationship between the player, narrator and player character, with a lot of dramatic irony (in the original sense of the audience knowing what's going on without the character doing so). This thing has been done before, but rarely in such a polished and enjoyable game.

Overall, the game feels effortlessly fun, but a great deal of work must have happened underneath to make this happen. Puzzles give you increasingly strong hints if you are stuck, a feature found in games like Coloratura and part of my own philosophy.

Large text dumps are fairly common, but read easily and are mostly based on the fairy tales.

I can strongly recommend this game, and enjoyed it quite a bit, perhaps the most I've enjoyed an IF this year.

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doctorspock, April 12, 2022 - Reply
The reviewer makes excuses for a game where you can MARRY A CHILD. Sorry, it doesn't make it right that the original condoned it. Reading this made me feel sick and makes we wonder what sort of person this reviewer is that normalises paedophilia. Frankly I'm done with his reviews.

MathBrush, April 12, 2022 - Reply
Sorry to have let you down! I've adjusted my review to make my position more plain to future readers.

Feel free to hit the 'plonk user' button next to my name, it will hide all my reviews from your view.

Amanda Walker, April 12, 2022 - Reply
Author's note: For what it's worth, the game takes terrible revenge on you if you attempt to marry the girl. It isn't normalized; (Spoiler - click to show)it's punished by death, which I assume Mathbrush knows, having played the game.
The entire point of the game is that the objectification and sexualization of women and girls in fairy tales is a bad thing.

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