The last few years have reminded us that the health systems of many countries are not in good shape. Even so, it’s hard to appreciate the challenges healthcare professionals face if you’re not one of them. Fall of Porcupine aims to do this in an accessible way by putting players in the shoes of a 2D animal doctor. Unfortunately, Critical Rabbit’s latest release isn’t the heavy medical drama wrapped in a fuzzy waffle blanket that we’d like. This cute game has so much potential, but it needed more care and a focused story to really take off.
An impressive amount of research and interviews went into the game’s much-needed commentary – everything from full beds to alternative medicine to corporate hospital management. It’s a shame that all the exploration results in a flat story with repetitive mechanics. You control Finley, an anthropomorphized pigeon and the newest doctor at St. Ursula in Porcupine Town. As you tend to patients, your boss, the white cheetah Dr. Krokowski, is constantly less than impressed with you. There’s also a fellow rookie doctor, a shady janitor, a head doctor, and MANY other characters that take the form of various animals.
Fall of Porcupine is mostly a 2D side scroller with some light platforming elements. You play through Finley’s work, life and dreams, and access quests using the in-game phone, which also keeps a log of actors and text messages before the game starts. These lyrics seemed to foreshadow a larger story, so it’s a shame that none of it leads anywhere.
The story drags on through the first two-thirds, punctuated by long stretches of Finley talking to an automaton or taunting his boss through an entire one-pigeon play. Whenever something interesting happened, we’d sit down and lean towards the screen, thinking, “Okay, now the story begins,” only to be let down shortly thereafter. Those dramatic moments would end in anticlimactic revelations, go off on tangents, or disappear altogether.
The unsatisfying story is interspersed with mini-games that mostly serve as Finley goes to the hospital. The better ones include color-matching puzzles and a symbol game that borrows from Wordle. Many of them are barely even mini-games, simply asking you to hold down several buttons at once in an unnatural twirl position, or ‘solve’ an obscure puzzle by talking to your neighbors until they give you the answer. Sometimes there’s even turn-based combat, just because. When it’s your turn, the puzzles are graded A, B, or C, which has no bearing on the patient’s diagnosis.
You can make in-game decisions with dialogue options and other small actions (taking a bus or walking), but it’s not clear if they affect friendship levels or story arcs. Of course, not everything has to, but in a game like this we wanted to know how our choices affected the outcome, if at all, and the results were inconsistent.
For a small town, Porcupine has an abundance of residents. They all talk a lot without saying much. Their motives are often left unexplained and their behavior is inconsistent. As a result, it is difficult to sympathize with them in their difficult times. Some events are emotional, but more in the sense that we knew we should feel sad and we didn’t feeling any real sadness. The story was so filled with fluff that we couldn’t grasp the emotionally meaningful things when they came up.
Fall of Porcupine also has a few performance issues on Switch. There is no way to manually save the game, and autosaves are rare. Several times the game froze on us, forcing us to restart. There are other minor flaws: conversations were repeated twice, the font size was inconsistent, the screen would sometimes move apart from Finley, and characters who were supposed to follow Finley would often get stuck on the stairs. Such things can be fixed later, but between these headaches and scratches, replaying an already repetitive game and pushing through frustrating moments was a test of our patience.
The heart of Fall of Porcupine is its sweet art style – a 2D brush look reminiscent of Night in the Woods and even A Short Walk. These artists know their way around the color wheel, which they use to bring the atmosphere of Porcupine and St. Ursula to life. Rainy nights are icy, colorful weekends are happy, hospital white walls are clean and clinical.
If the visual style is the heart of Fall of Porcupine, then the music is its brain. The soundtrack mixes folk rock, slow-paced acoustic sounds and dark dramatic melodies to drive the feel of the game – that is, when you can hear it. We found that wearing headphones gave us the best performance, otherwise the volume was so high that our speakers hissed. Sound effects like crashes, shouts and thunder also helped ground the scenes.
We’re also grateful to Critical Rabbit for including a trigger warning at the start of the game, and there are accessibility settings like Dyslexia Mode and Color Mode to help players. It’s always nice to see games that include these options and highlight potential triggers.
It’s hard to give Fall of Porcupine an overwhelmingly positive review after playing other indie titles that do similar things much better: heavy themes (Spiritfarer), strong storytelling (Night in the Woods, Beacon Pines), gameplay (Stardew Valley). While its art and music stand out, they aren’t enough to make up for the uneven story or gameplay. We recommend playing this only after you’ve exhausted the enjoyable games listed above – and even others we haven’t listed that you may have bought but haven’t played yet.
Conclusion
Fall of Porcupine has a lot of potential, but our diagnosis is that it fell short. The cute art style and evocative soundtrack are its main features, and while the wide-eyed animals can mask the dark themes of an unhealthy system, they can’t quite mask the haphazard story or keep players engaged. We felt that the game needed a stronger narrative thread or more involved gameplay to improve its condition. Performance bugs can be treated with patches, but it will take more than Band-Aids to cure the ailments in Fall of Porcupine.
