Having grown up with gaming since that 80’s (thank you dad for your ZX Spectrum +3) I remember a time when text adventures didn’t mean visual novel. They could be short, snappy paragraphs and sentences that describe the immediate context and the player made constant decisions to get to the next paragraph. Graphics were barebones, if they existed at all and so imagination, style, tone of voice and the written word was king.
Fixer’s Tale is something of a throwback to this specific type of text adventure game – albeit it comes with graphics! You play as a janitor dropped into a facility full of research labs where everything seems to shut down into an eerie silence. Each of the 5 floors of the facility has multiple labs and each lab has a very different type of puzzle to solve. One is a quiz, one is a point n click adventure, one is like time travel geocaching, others are memory based and each action you take is only a paragraph away. As you move between locations, choose an action or perhaps have a conversation with a suicidal and depressive robot, there’s only room on screen for a few short sentences. This means that the writing is tight and unlike visual novels (which have taken over somewhat from text adventures these days) decisions and player interaction happens every few seconds.
The writing of Fixer’s Tale is great. Between the world building and the self aware pop, sci-fi and gaming culture references littered across the game, you’ll be having a good time. The puzzle labs themselves vary in difficulty and complexity but Fixer’s Tale delights in the player finding lots of ways to do badly. Most of the Steam achievements relate to all the ways you can die. You never lose much progress when it happens and that’s just as well because sometimes if you’ve missed a clue or not paid attention, you might find yourself purely guessing at how to solve something. Fixer’s Tale doesn’t hold you hand and its all the better for it.
To dive further into the plot would spoil the fun. There are multiple endings and layers to the story and puzzles nest within bigger puzzles which act as a general gatekeeper to stop the player wandering too far off course. As Fixer’s Tale largely lets you explore things and solve parts of the game at your own pace in your own order, that can mean you’ll miss something that makes one puzzle easier for example. You might also need to do a quick sweep of all the facility floors to trigger a specific event too. These are tiny niggles though in what is a well crafted experience. It’ll take you about 2 hours to complete a playthrough but many more to see all the different endings and find out how to die in many different ways.
Fixer’s Tale is a refreshingly streamlined take on sci-fi adventuring. Witty writing, different puzzles and a sculpted style make it seem quite unassuming at first glance but it comes alive once you’ve spent 10 minutes with it. A fine narrative adventure with a light approach to some existential philosophical themes.
Review copy provided by developer. Fixer’s Tale is out now on Steam.
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