Well, I gave it a shot. If you didn't see it earlier today, I posted an Indie Game of the Week that covered Kathy Rain; a sterling example of what the adventure game genre can be in this modern era where they no longer feel compelled to throw enormous budgets and intolerable mini-games at the player to justify a high price point. For as many details as I like about The Feeble Files - the voice-acting, the sinister fascistic monopoly that keeps a loose federation of space-faring alien races in check, an in-game encyclopedia of terms and important names - it's bogged down by the myriad of poor decisions that seemed to affect every game of its specific vintage, including the oft-praised but far too interminable for my liking Grim Fandango (released the following year). It's not just that the game lacks walking speed accelerators, or little in the way of a fast travel system, or a button that highlights all hotspots in the vicinity - all regular modern concessions that I'm sure existed in one form or another in 1997 - but the fact that it's just so bloated, and that every puzzle takes ten times longer than it needs to and is ten times more obtuse than anyone could possibly want.

A good example of this is a puzzle sequence early on where you're looking for a docking permit for a freighter pilot who is carrying confidence-boosting pills you'll need to charm your way past an unhelpful receptionist and meet your superior officer. As convoluted as that sounds, it's fairly explicable in game: you pass the bickering freighter pilot and dock employee on the way to the main city area, and can easily eavesdrop on how the pilot has "chemical supplements to offload", and then get the pitch for the "Charisma X" pills and their effect when you poke your head into the drug store while exploring, allowing you to mentally put several steps of the immediate puzzle together in short order. What's less clear is that you need the docking permit from another freighter pilot off-world who is delivering "music disks" of a popular band. This popular band distributed songs with lyrics that could potentially be seen as rebellious, so what you need to do is take the protest leaflet of a dweeb trying to shut the band down, find a kiosk in the local church that allows citizens to report on potentially traitorous crimes, and then have a local Enforcer take down the music disk trucker for transporting goods which were outlawed as contraband just moments prior, leaving his docking permit behind for the taking. Beyond the obvious issue of "why does this plan have a thousand stupid and barely connected steps", there's a couple of stages in this process that make absolutely zero sense. The first is that you have to take this protest leaflet and enlarge it before the "report traitors here" machine will accept it: something the machine itself doesn't tell you when you try submitting the normal-sized document and have it rejected. You can enlarge items by visiting the first location in the game, which has a teleporter that broke during the prologue, but unless you knew that you needed a larger version of the document there's no reason why you'd come back here just to make it bigger. The second issue is that the church with the reporting machine is completely inaccessible because Feeble doesn't feel he needs to confess to any sins - you have to commit a sin to gain entry, which means kicking a vending machine somewhere else on the station after feeding coins into three times with no result, which also means you have to know to keep putting coins in until the kicking scene triggers. Once in the church, you then have access to the machine - that you wouldn't have any idea was in there, mind - to proceed with the above primary puzzle sequence.

I think everyone's familiar with Old Man Murray's treatise on why the adventure gaming genre died, pointing to a particularly notorious moon logic puzzle in the third Gabriel Knight game where you have to pretend to be the person on a pilfered ID card by creating an elaborate moustache from torn-out cat hair and then adding a moustache to the picture on the ID card, because the man whom it belongs to didn't have facial hair to begin with. It's inexplicable for the sake of a puzzle, the sort of adventure game contrivance that has no bearing on reality, and The Feeble Files is full of the things. To reiterate also: all these elements you have to visit - the pilot and worker in the docking bay, the drug store, the church with the narc machine, the lab with the broken teleporter, and the second pilot with the music disks chilling in a space bar - are all several screens apart, and there's no quick way to travel between them other than returning to where you parked your space bike to revisit the map selection screen each time. I've just reached a point in the game where I'm in a jail that uses hypnotic suggestion to keep the prisoners in line, and I've just figured out how to break the suggestion and explore beyond my cell, only to find that the entire prison is a huge maze with lots of guards that will throw you back in your hole whenever you take the wrong path. I'm pretty much donezo. The game seems tailor-made to pad out its run-time and I'm finding that I have a dwindling supply of tolerance for any of its nonsense. If I didn't have the patience for Grim Fandango, there's little chance poor Feeble will make the grade.

So, I didn't hate this game per se, but I hate the era from which it hails. That point in time where adventure games were circling the drain because they didn't know how to stay relevant, so they instead chose to be annoying and abstruse so you could walk away at the end thinking "well, this game took me a year to beat, talk about good value for money!". With sensible puzzle design and a few of those quality-of-life concessions I mentioned earlier, I'd be way into an comedic adventure game about a dweeby alien scientist using his wits to fight back against an oppressive government that keeps its population complacent with thousands of "directives" and the threat of annihilation for not being happy enough, especially if it featured a voice actor from one of my favorite sci-fi shows. I really liked the first two Simon the Sorcerer games from the same developer too, even if they also skirted the line of having way-too-obtuse puzzles on occasion. I was glad to know that it wasn't just me being old man grouchy towards a genre I've outgrown; enjoying Kathy Rain as much as I did was evidence enough that I'm still a fan of this type of game when done well.

So, having little fun with the game and with less of a week left to go in May, I've chosen to bow out of The Feeble Files relatively early in the game's progression so I can focus on the fifth and final game for this year's May Maturity feature, which I'll be writing about soon enough. It never feels great to abandon a game mid-playthrough, but sometimes I just can't find the motivation to continue.

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