You are an anthropomorphised bird named Finley. You’ve just moved to Porcupine, a small town where everyone knows everyone. You’ve just started work at the local hospital as a junior doctor, and already things are going a little haywire. You’re trying to keep up with your boss’ expectations, while trying to have some kind of social life outside of demanding hospital shifts, and you do your best to build friendships with the other residents of the town. But the career you’ve chosen begins to take its toll on you, and before long, everything is going to shit.
Fall of Porcupine’s message is clear, though the way you get to it is a little convoluted and abstruse. There is something deeply wrong with the healthcare system, made worse by the mismanagement of the people working within it. No matter how hard doctors work, they will always be beaten down by the nature of their job. Patients will die. Without proper staffing they will be perpetually overworked. In the event of a pandemic, like the one that killed millions of people in 2020 and beyond, all they can do is their best, but with limited resources, they are bound to fail.
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It’s a worthwhile message, and one that honours the sacrifices healthcare professionals made over the pandemic and continue to make today, but the story didn’t have to jump through so many hoops to get there. It opens with a dream sequence that Finley has as he recovers from a head wound, one that he got while tracking down a patient who accidentally found himself in a disused ward. The mystery of how the wound happened hovers over the game, with Finley questioning if the incident had really been an accident, or whether, as he believed, somebody else had been up there with him and the patient. The truth turns out not to be nearly as sinister or even supernatural as my runaway imagination led me to think, and I found myself almost disappointed.
This is part of a tonal inconsistency that permeated Fall of Porcupine. Most of this fairly standard adventure game is straightforward, almost realistic, apart from the talking animals. You walk through town, talk to people, make friends, go to work. But there are also long conversations Finley has with statues where he voices both sides. At one point, he enters a forest and does some lightweight platforming with floating rock platforms, a diversion from what is otherwise a very grounded game. He has a nightmare where bad things happen, and while this serves the story well, the tone of the game doesn’t shift hard enough to ever feel consistent.
Gameplay itself is fine. I enjoyed playing at being a doctor, with all Finley’s tasks like diagnosis, giving shots, changing bandages and examining patients done through minigames that get more complex as the game goes on. The difficulty level wasn’t consistent however, and some minigames were poorly explained as I was left floundering trying to figure out what to do, but they got their point across: going from medical school to working on a ward is a big jump, and one that can leave inexperienced doctors feeling vastly out of their depth. As the games got more complex, I found myself struggling more and more.
It’s a shame that so many bugs bring this original concept down. I found myself having conversations with characters who were clearly meant to be on-screen, but were nowhere to be found. It crashed on me a few times too. Sometimes I would be mid-conversation and I would find myself unable to keep progressing unless I reloaded a save.
When accompanied by my in-game friends, they’d sometimes disappear when moving from place to place, and people would address me and have conversations with me as if you’re not alone. Dialogue bubbles didn’t always fit on the screen. Sometimes a character would run through what was clearly two separate conversation branches with me in quick succession. I could go on.
Much of my experience was salvaged by the beautiful visuals, heavily reminiscent of Night in the Woods, and the very endearing cast of characters that Finley gets to know during his time at Porcupine. I loved walking to work every day, chatting with the owner of the local pub, checking in with the woman who fished by the sewer, and dropping by the flower shop to see how my friend, the florist, was doing. I enjoyed bumping into patients on the street and seeing how much they’d improved. Every character had a distinct personality and felt alive, and helping them out in between shifts coloured the world in and made the experience fun, instead of just tolerable. But there’s only so much that can do to buoy a game so bogged down with inconsistencies and bugs.
Score: 2/5. A game code for Nintendo Switch was provided.
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