Before I met my best friend, I thought video games were the slowest, most boring form of storytelling that existed. See, if the protagonist of a movie needed to get to the fifth floor, the film would just jump cut to him entering the fifth floor. In a video game, the protagonist (who is you) would need to climb multiple flights of stairs in order to get to the same destination.
Substantial time has passed since then and I now appreciate video games that do exactly what I used to complain about. When most of the media you consume is constantly trying to be fast-paced and exciting, it’s nice to play a game every now and then that’s so unconcerned with all of that, one that encourages you to go slow and take in the world around you.
With similar visual-novel-like gameplay to Night in the Woods and the cozy laid-back nature of A Short Hike, Fall of Porcupine has you playing as a bird named Finley, the new doctor of St. Ursula’s Hospital, as well as the new resident of the town of Porcupine. Apart from working your job, you’ll be making friends, exploring your new town, and enjoying everything Porcupine offers.
Gameplay-wise, Fall of Porcupine is incredibly simple: You roam around your town or hospital and converse with other characters. Sometimes, you’ll play a mini-game, which usually happens when caring for a patient. Some are puzzle-based, some feel like rhythm games, and some feel like the Flash games many of us used to play on websites like Neopets and Millsberry.
I wasn’t wild about any of them, but I greatly appreciate how there’s a solid variety of these games, and they’re all thankfully short and relatively easy. With Night in the Woods, I couldn’t stand the bass guitar mini-game — not only because it was an unnecessarily difficult part of an otherwise easy game, but also because the songs always felt so long.
That said, however, Night in the Woods did allow you to replay its bass guitar and Demontower mini-game whenever you felt like it. Fall of Porcupine players are offered no such opportunity. It’s far from a dealbreaker, but this game could greatly benefit from including a way to practice its mini-games, especially since the inclusion of a grading system does incentivise players to get the perfect score as much as possible.
Because the challenge only comes from the mini-games, Fall of Porcupine relies heavily on its characters and story to carry the experience, and it’s mostly successful in this regard. Finley is an easily likable protagonist — he’s friendly, observational, and even childlike in the best of ways. There’s a sweet innocence in the way he interacts with the world around him.
The same can be said for just about all of his friends and many of his patients. There are rude patients, grumpy co-workers, and cranky town residents, but a good number of characters Finley interacts with are just as sweet and friendly as him. They’re great to spend time with, and the town of Porcupine is a delight to be in.
Porcupine feels like such a terrific little town, the kind you wish you could visit or even live in. The game truly shines when Finley is out of the hospital and allowed to explore this well-defined quaint town. This feels like the idealized version of small-town living.
Visually, Porcupine is a joy, with cool easy colors and charming character and landscape designs. It also helps that Fall of Porcupine is set in, well, fall, so anyone who loves the warmth of autumn is sure to find themselves lost in wanderlust here. The music is great, too, capturing that wonderfully aimless feeling you get when you’re mindlessly wandering around a beautiful place.
Porcupine isn’t an open world and therefore doesn’t have the strong variety of in-world activities as something like A Short Hike does, but you can still feel elements of what made A Short Hike great, such as the slow pace and the sense of whimsy from exploring and discovering more about this place.
Actually, the slow pace fits Fall of Porcupine so well that its third act is easily the weakest. The first two acts are relaxed and breezy, so it’s disappointing that the third act suddenly feels the pressure to have a thrilling conflict and an exciting climax. I found myself largely uninterested in the amount of running and rushing this act forced me to do, and the game’s layout only highlighted how ill-matched all of this was for Fall of Porcupine.
“You have to rush to the fifth floor!” the game tells you, meaning you have to climb multiple flights of stairs, which only slows down the exciting pace the game is trying for. “Hurry to the store!” the game says, meaning you have to traverse long portions of the town, only reminding you that this game was designed, first and foremost, for a slower pace.
However, for the most part, Fall of Porcupine succeeds with its warm, cozy atmosphere, as well as its calming music, soft colors, and lush visuals. I found myself enjoying living in this warm hug of a town and suspect there’s a lot that I missed out on, like this coffee shop that I was never able to buy coffee from or this character I remember only talking to once, which means I’m looking forward to a replay. A sweet, relaxing time, Fall of Porcupine is the video game equivalent of petrichor.
A Steam key was provided by PR for the purposes of this review.
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