Fumiko!
I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about this game for a few days now, and I’m still not sure. Fumiko is clearly a passion project for the individual behind it, someone who perhaps doesn’t have a firm grasp on what are considered to be “best practices” but that I think works in spite of and perhaps in part because of this fact.
Described on its store page as being heavily inspired by Serial Experiments Lain, it is basically a 3d platforming adventure game. You play as Fumiko, an AI imprisoned within the network that is this universe’s version of the internet within which much of society has moved into.
There are a few touches that play towards this, such as randomly popping up requests for 5 star evaluations and an individual who has wallpapered their virtual house with ads in order to finance it. Most of the other touches are less blatant, generally along the lines of numerous graphic filter effects made ups of bits of code or 0s and 1s.
So yeah, takes place in a virtual network, that’s the setting, etc.
The game basically has two clear strengths on which it depends. The first is how it handles movement and platforming, which is by making it absurdly overpowered. A single jump can send you about twenty or so feet into the air and can horizontally cover about as much space. Instead of building to a double jump you instead start with one and end up adding further multiple jumps on top of it as you gain further control of your abilities, so in theory you need to think more in terms of say quintuple jumps. In actuality you don’t because the game eventually gives you a dash button, and it handles it in the most over the top way imaginable: you can press the dash button as many times as you want during any kind of movement. Why double jump when you can just dash when taking a vertical hop that then sends you sky high? Because you can dash during each jump of a double (or quintuple) jump to just send you flying around in a manner that more closely resembles limited flight as opposed to just jumping.
The scale of the places in this game are all quite massive but in many ways they often pale in comparison to what you are capable of movement-wise. Once you realize the full extent of your abilities you can basically soar above and beyond most of the as-designed platforming challenges. You see a bunch of blocks floating in space to jump across and many times you can just jump over the entire section with relative ease rather than hop along them as likely intended. This… is probably a flaw, but in essence it works as almost a different kind of power fantasy than the type you usually see in games. Rather than being the ultimate bad ass who can kill hundreds in a day your movement abilities can basically at times break the game in front of you. As someone who has the gaming disease where if I see something tall in a game I have to know if I can climb to the top of it I am very much down with this particular fantasy.
The other main strength of the game is its aesthetic. I love how this game looks. It is all very polygonal and flat shaded yet massive in scope and often with all sorts of effects all over the place. I don’t know that it is what would be considered traditionally beautiful but as sort of a late PS1/early PS2 aesthetic on steroids it has a look that sticks out and kept me wanting to see what it was going to show me next; it rarely disappointed in this regard. Even if I thought everything else was awful it’d be worth going through it just to look at everything.
When we get down to the actual game part of the experience it very much feels like a game put together by someone without much experience in making games and who put more thought into other parts of the design. This doesn’t mean these parts are bad, but progressing through things can definitely be odd. What it asks of you can be rather different from part to part, often times you just have to talk to someone but other times you’ll have to climb or jump (sometimes it can be skipped, other times the scale of it is built to require the full extent of your abilities). You may have to find a way to light up random elements in the environment, or fall through a field of obstacles avoiding the ones that can harm you while being chased by a swarm of homing missiles, it is all over the place and at times it can be a bit rough or poorly explained. This isn’t even touching on the rare “boss” encounters which can just throw a ton of stuff at you. Like I said as a hobbyist work it was made by someone without the best grasp of established best practices and it does occasionally bite you, but I think overall it gives Fumiko enough of its own flavor to bring more to the table than it takes away. That said… if this was only pure game parts I wouldn’t have bothered writing it up, it ain’t the draw or the point.
There is a lot of effort put into the narrative and I am still unsure of it. This is where the Lain influence is most evident and clearly the developer cared a lot about it, and there are a few clever turns here and there. I am unsure if it all quite comes together… but I also thought the same about Serial Experiments Lain and still dug that. Rather than pick it apart I’ll instead just post a bunch of random screencaps I took that I like.
So is Fumiko a perfect game? No, far from it. It makes a bunch of weird design decisions of which at least a couple are gonna bother some of you. What it does have is its own sense of identity as I can’t name another game exactly like this one. I can’t promise that you’ll love the story as much as the author does, or that you won’t hit a point where you’re stuck trying to figure out how to advance, but if you want to just go leaping and flying around a bunch of massive place with reckless abandon as you take in a distinct and IMHO absolutely delightful set of visuals in the course of playing a game designed by someone who clearly just went for it this may just be the ride to take. It surely won’t be for everyone, and it won’t always be smooth sailing, but I went from going “is this good?” and “do I like this?” to going “okay yeah, I’m definitely down with this.” I’m very glad to have stumbled across it.
