Fe review – dreamlike forest quest loses its way

PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch; Zoink/Electronic Arts
Befriending the animals and learning their languages while you avoid the marauding Silent Ones is too much like hard work

For a game about a fox-like creature exploring a living forest and using song to unite its inhabitants, Fe is weirdly mechanical. There is something lovely about singing gently with animals, as you coax your controller's right trigger into producing just the right frequency to harmonise with a young bird or deer. But these animal friendships are fundamentally a cog in the game's machine. It's plausibly a commentary on the nature of an ecosystem, but the emotional reward doesn't compensate a player for the amount of busywork.

The overarching motivation for Fe's adventure is the threatening presence of armoured bipeds called the Silent Ones, though this arbitrary narrative actually provides little real motivation. Your journey is gated by plants that each offer a new way to progress. Big orange flowers produce a draft that lifts Fe into the air so you can reach higher places; green buds produce explosives that Fe can throw at certain barriers. Each plant only responds to one of six languages that Fe can learn from the matriarchal adult version of each of the forest's creatures.