First-person explorer Sketchy Fables is a twitchy, teeming feast of hand-drawn art with acting from Hades 2’s Sarah Grayson

Sketchy Fables is a first-person explorathon in which, if you kill things with homing butterflies, the world will grow more beautiful, whereas if you kill things with shotguns, the world will slowly succumb to “dark layers filled with loss, decay, and the end of lives”. Sure beats Paragon/Renegade.

In a pinch, you can also batter creatures with the stickerbook housing all the bizarre artefacts you’ve discovered. I’m not sure how weaponising the very inventory contributes to the landscape’s transformations, but I do know that I’d like to see this kind of diegetic design in, say, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which has menus made of solid wood.

In general, it doesn’t feel like there’s a particularly firm line between ‘beauty’ and ‘darkness’ in Sketchy Fables. There aren’t many firm lines at all. Each of Sketchy Fables’ hundreds of “hand-animated” props is a wavering putrescence, excitable as Sylvia Plath’s tulips, fidgeting and buckling as though it were being completed under your nose. The world is actively seeking a shape, with the player’s interventions keeping the detail in flux. Everything from the sabre-tooted rats in the tunnels to the old man hunkered by a washing machine appears vibrant and leaky, in ways both charming and slightly sickening. Your character’s very hands look like unwashed easels, bruised and gangrenous.

Somewhere in the guts of all this, there is Plot. “You wake up in your bedroom at home,” explains the Steam page. “In your thoughts lingers the heartwarming invitation to visit your grandmother, who lives in the tallest skyscraper of the bustling city. The world lies open before you, but will you set out on the journey to her, or will unexpected events lead you in a completely different direction? The choice is yours.”

Me, I’m too overstimulated at the moment to make choices at all. Throughout the demo I was beset by a mysterious shrill cacophony. I figured my computer fan was giving up the ghost, at long last. But then I looked down and realised I was surrounded by chirping chicks.

That’s Sarah Grayson of Gone Home and Hades 2 fame doing the narration. There’s some disappointing news regarding the script: developer Alle Jong has used generative AI to localise some of the supported languages. “I wrote the entire game myself, starting from my native languages, Dutch and Frisian,” he explains in a dev update. “I worked from the Dutch text for the translations and used AI to make most of the localization possible. I am aware that the quality may vary from one language to another.

“Because of limited time and budget, I had to make a choice as a solo developer: either localize the game, or not localize it at all,” Jong adds. “In the end, I believe it is better to make Sketchy Fables available in as many languages as possible than to offer no translations at all. In that way, I hope to make the game more accessible to a wider audience.”

I can sympathise with Jong’s resource pressures, given the huge effort evidently plunged into the art, but the use of generative AI – a wildly overhyped, irresponsibly managed set of tools reliant on stolen labour – for localisation really sticks out in a game that valorises doing things by hand. It just seems a shame. The full version of Sketchy Fables launches… “soon”. If you like how it wriggles, you might also enjoy Death of a Wish.