With the successful completion of Ultima Underworld II yesterday, May Maturity thunders on with its fourth game of the season: Adventure Soft's The Feeble Files. Adventure Soft was one of the last, great UK-based adventure game developers, having made their mark on the genre - and the gaming industry - with their sardonic Simon the Sorcerer series. Building on the humor and storybuilding of those games, they set their sights on the stars for their follow-up. The Feeble Files follows the eponymous Feeble, a low-level alien scientist with a fascination for Earth customs and a generally meek and passive demeanor, whose otherwise ordered life is thrown into chaos due to circumstances (mostly) beyond his control.
The Feeble Files is a straightforward enough graphic adventure game, employing a set of context-sensitive cursor icons with which to interact with the world and an in-game informational index for any terms and place names that aren't obvious enough from context. Its presentation was the high point at the time of release: it has a full voice cast, including Red Dwarf's Robert Llewelyn (another Red Dwarf alum, Chris Barrie, had previously voiced the eponymous character of Simon the Sorcerer) as Feeble, and Peter Tuddenham as Feeble's omniscient hand computer Oracle, pretty much mirroring the same role he played in cheapie British sci-fi classic Blake's 7 (fans of Giant Bomb East might recognize Paul Darrow from the same show; he also played the curmudgeonly Paul Rand in Contradiction: Spot the Liar).
It's Like the X-Files, but Feebler
Welcome to The Feeble Files? Who does this dork think he is, Space Fonzie?Feeble's job appears to be leaving crop circles on Earth farms for the heck of it. That's literally his job title, far as I can ascertain.On the way back home he bumps into an asteroid field, as you do. Did you know that most asteroid fields, like our own Asteroid Belt, have asteroids spaced many thousands of kilometers apart and are thus impossible to hit if you don't suck at flying a spaceship? It's one of those facts that belong to a broad field I call Applied deGrassian Pedantology.Anyway, Feeble does suck at flying, so ends up badly damaging his craft. The good news is that the ship isn't his; the bad news is that it belongs to his impossibly powerful omnipresent "Company" and they intend for him to pay up.Oh man, I'm so looking forward to the new Metro Prime. I hope we hear more at E3. I'm also hoping the graphics will be a lot better than this. It looks like the set of the movie Toys if it was ejected into space.Anyway, it's back to the grind for ol' Feeble. This throwaway scene actually features a number of NPCs that'll be showing up later in the playthrough. Coincidence? Or saving money on reusing character models? Who can say?Feeble's superior isn't pleased with him. Apparently, an alien probe that Feeble bumped into on the way back (strongly hinted to be Voyager) crashed into the lab. The first mission of the game is to report the damage back to HQ.First, Feeble needs to be properly dressed to fly his space bike. We're not told what apposite attire he'll need, but I'll assume a helmet is part of it. Anyway, we now have control of the game, hence the little movement hand (foot?) icon. Tapping the top left symbol brings up Oracle, Feeble's handy wrist computer. Something about the interface is a little too "BioForge" for my liking.ENCY brings you to the in-game encyclopedia, which slowly lists every glossary term you could possibly need to consult, each of which has a Mass Effect 1 style voiceover that speaks far slower than you can read. I appreciate the effort, but...It scrolls for a whiiiiiile (though you can skip it, I later found out). It has a bunch of these "directives", rules for Feeble's alien federation to live by, as per the instructions of the all-powerful "OmniBrain". Nerd Digression: I suspect the sheer number of directives is a reference to the easily confused Space Corps Directives of Red Dwarf, the misapplication of which was a running joke throughout the sixth season.There's also these handful of commands in SET (settings). Hitbox names tell you the names of the hotspots you can interact with, default OFF, and the Info button tells you your current objectives in a vague enough way to avoid hints, also default OFF. These should both be on. What shouldn't be on, and is by default, is the Oracle Greeting Message which uses up precious seconds every time you open this menu. (The other commands: STAT tells you about Feeble himself, including the list of crimes he's committed recently, while DISK lets you save/load/quit, and OFF returns to the game.)Man, it's great that the game now tells me what the hell this thing is, and that it's something I can interact with. Very few items in this room are hotspots you can interact with, despite the number of expensive looking gadgets in here.Collected items are beamed directly into the Oracle, where they can be examined and used with other items. There's a size limit for individual items, obviously, but there doesn't seem to be a limit for the number you can carry. Not sure about only being able to see six or seven items at once; I just hope I won't be carrying dozens of items before this playthrough's over.The solution, which even an idiot could ascertain, was putting the tiny doll of a human into the broken teleporter so it glitches out and embiggens it. This lets you take his leather jacket for your own. Man, I hope all the puzzles in the game are this OBVIOUS. I'd be so pleased if the game continued to be this FOOLPROOF. Arbitrary teleporter accidents! OF COURSE!Anyway, we figured that out, so along with a helmet I found in a locker I can get off this tiny observatory rock and back to Metro Prime.Oh, great. It's one of these games. Just give me half a dozen destinations and no idea which ones are going to be pertinent to the current puzzle. Better visit them all. First! Let's go to Metro Prime, since that's what we've been told to do.Upon landing, you eavesdrop on these two arguing. The left guy is a freighter pilot who has misplaced his docking permits, while the right guy is the stickler harbormaster who refuses to let him off the hook. We're told the cargo are "chemical supplements", so whether that'll be relevant or not is entirely unclear right now. But, well, they bothered to animate these guys having a five minute conversation, so it's probably important...?Nothing else to do in the docking area. Time to go see what Samus is up to.Agh, I really don't care for "Destination Overload". Not that adventure games should be these entirely linear things, but there's a lot here to unpack: the news kiosk to the top left, the vid-phone booth in the center, the teleporter to the bottom left, and the pill store to the right. There's more on the bottom floor. I guess we'll be checking out all these places too.I eventually found the way to the Company's HQ, but like practically every adventure game made after Douglas Adams's Bureaucracy for C64, there's some red tape to get past first. Case in point: I need an appointment to meet with my superior, despite the fact I was summoned here to report in.Drugs are the answer, as they so often are. I figure if I can pick up some Charisma X pills I might be able to charm my way past that receptionist. Unfortunately, the store is all sold out and the next shipment is late... Oh. Right. Chemical supplements. Gotcha.Exploring more. I'm fairly sure I shouldn't be here yet. Also nice Simon the Sorcerer poster, you hacks.Checking out some of those other destinations outside the city. The junk yard doesn't have much besides this sweet car. I can't do anything with it yet besides sit in it and dream, though I suspect we might be replacing our Space Moped eventually. (Is that an X-Wing hull over there?)Dave's Bar is a little more active. There's a number of NPCs we can talk to, including this incredibly subtle revolutionary named Dolores. She offers us a delivery job that'll almost certainly not involve an attempt to overthrow the government (to her credit, she tells Feeble this directly, and Feeble thinks she's joking). She's one of three people I've met so far with an actual name, so I suspect she'll show up again.This guy's trying to petition the censure of a band called TLC. First, don't go chasing waterfalls young man. Second, I think a rented SUV already rendered your crusade moot.This scary looking dude is an "enforcer" - a.k.a. a space cop - and talking to him is enough to almost get you arrested and lobotomized. I've already had enough trouble with pigs today after finishing A Link to the Past.Our acquisition of that suspicious contraband did not go unnoticed. We see this little ominous scene of a higher-up threatening to arrest us as soon as we get back to Metro Prime.So instead, I'm going to this nightclub to lie low. Except it's locked. Except I have no other choice but to go back and complete that delivery. I'm sure it'll be fine though. Bad things never happen to protagonists of adventure games.
I'm going to call it there, because I'm already close to the point where I'm two puzzles in and have no idea how to proceed. Activating the "Info" button at least lets me keep track of what I ought to be doing: in this case, getting an appointment with my boss, finding a way to resolve the dispute between the freighter pilot and the harbormaster, and delivering what is probably a bomb to some shady people in that alleyway I passed earlier. If I had to guess, I'll need to solve all those predicaments before I get my appointment, and THEN I'll be arrested and forced into the next part of the game.
That's a tale for another time, however. I'll be back in a few days with an Outro for this game, since it hasn't been so irritating that I'm willing to throw in the towel just yet. I am enjoying the voice acting and script at least, if not perhaps the obtuse puzzles, and its hooked me sufficiently that I'm curious to see where the game will go. It's the bare minimum needed to keep my interest, but as a fan of the Simon the Sorcerer games I feel I owe this game at least a half-assed chance.
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