Following on from the quirky 2022 racing title Running Fable, which pitted tortoise and hare against each other in trap-ridden races, the Running Fable brand becomes an IP with a second game. Petite Party is a minigame collection for 1-4 players to play locally. AI opponents can optionally fill in any gaps, and there is a board game mode alongside just selecting minigames to play.
It is important to call out that Petite Party is a small-scale minigame collection. There are 16 minigames, and some are more developed and interesting than others. Personal favourites include one game where you grab apples from a well and deposit them in the right cauldron whilst barging others out of the way, a rhythm game that requires moving your left analogue stick to capture the rhythm instead of just pressing buttons, and a fishing game that allows you to steal other players’ fish. Most of the minigames have some form of betrayal involved, letting you steal other players’ objects or bash them out of the way. This works in principle, but as most of the minigames are quite small in scale, all too often, games can turn into a messy polygon jumble sale of players getting stuck together. The worst example of this is a boating race, which asks players to steer through gates to capture flags. The arena is a tiny square, so any bombs dropped or whirlpools found usually blow up or wipe out all the players. The game descends into unsatisfying chaos.
The controls in Running Fable Petite Party aren’t too bad. There are elements of woolliness, but sometimes that is down to the choppy framerate the game runs at. Whether it’s the unsmooth animations of the hare characters or a frame rate issue, controlling the hare feels choppy and floaty. The tortoise looks smoother, but the floatiness remains. It is also strange that for a 4-player party game, there are only two characters to choose from. Yes, they come with multiple costumes each, but having four characters would have made a lot more sense.
Continuing the odd design choices, board game mode is included in the game, but it is strangely designed. Each of the three identically laid out boards have 16 spaces to move through, with a couple of miss-a-turn traps on a few of them. Players take turns rolling a die and moving their piece, and then everyone plays a minigame. The minigame has absolutely zero impact on the board game. No one moves forward or backwards for winning or coming last. No one takes control of the turn order to go first as a result of winning. You just keep rolling the die, and the first to reach the 16th space wins. It is a bizarre undermining of the minigames and makes absolutely no logical sense being designed in that way. The board game mode is not worth your time, so I’d recommend just playing the 16 minigames instead. Be aware that after each minigame, you’ll be dumped back in the character selection screen again, rather than just selecting your next minigame.
There are lots of little things that point towards a lack of playtesting overall. When you finish a board game, three times out of four, the game gets stuck. The descriptions of what you need to do in some of the minigames do not make sense until you are actually in the game itself. The weird back to the start of the menus decision every time you play a mini game. The fact that the game never launches in full-screen mode, and you have to Alt+Enter it every time. There are a lot of quality-of-life things that shouldn’t be here in a full release version of a game. It is a shame because there are some moments of fun buried underneath all the issues. I’m not sure a few patches will be able to turn the game around, but this is a step back from the first Running Fable game in the franchise. I cannot recommend it in its current state.
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