I think on the offset, Looking for Fael isn’t a difficult game to pitch, but perhaps one that takes a second to get to grips with. You play as, well, not Fael, but his roommate, who, as you may have guessed, is looking for Fael after receiving a strange voicemail message where he says he is somehow lost in your apartment. What follows is then a reality bending puzzle game where the world itself is a puzzle, but also you have to play a spin (pun intended) on the objectively best game ever made, Tetris.
A thing to note about Looking for Fael is that it is a game that wants you to take notes. It suggests as such before its demo kicks off, and you quickly find that that will be the case, given that your first task is figuring out the code to your post box (though, memory will likely save you at this stage). Upon opening this box, you are greeted with an off-brand Game Boy, a Game Leaf in this instance, which you can then dock in at various points to play games of sort-of Tetris.
By this I mean you have a set list of blocks that you push out from pre-determined sides of the screen, which then have to fall on particular points to complete the puzzle. After doing this a handful of times, a doohicky lights up and you light up some squares and bam, what was the hallway outside of your apartment is now also your apartment, but different, stranger, covered in greenery. You catch a glimpse of the outside world, and where a vaguely European city was before is now simply an endless sky.
You complete a couple more Tetris puzzles, each steadily increasing in difficulty, requiring you to use that part of your brain that helps you pack your suitcase again after you bought way too much stuff in that once in a lifetime trip to Japan, and you bend reality to enter yet another apartment. And more and more puzzles within the world itself pop up, varying in nature and complexity, like one where you have to pause various documentaries about stick insects at just the right time.
Quite quickly Looking for Fael called The Witness to mind, albeit without the obvious baggage attached to that one. It’s a sort of escape room of a game, one where you really need to love both Tetris and potentially obtuse puzzles with equal intensity. I don’t know if I can bring that intensity, but I’m certainly quite curious about the full thing.
It’s filled with such lovely art too, various boxes of faux Gundam strewn about the place, one room which has a mixture of fan art of literally Samus Aran, Aerith Gainsborough, Goku, and more alongside fictitious posters and comics that I desperately wish were real. Completely unrelated to this, I found a lot of joy in seeing European plug sockets. How often do you see those in games! Silly, I know, but it tickled me in just the right way.
Anyway, the demo for Looking for Fael is available as part of this season’s Steam Next Fest, so you can have a gander, or just wishlist it, on Steam right here.
