Review | Fall of Porcupine - Feeling A Little Blue
Fall of Porcupine is the first game by studio Critical Rabbit. Set in the small town of Porcupine, you play as a junior doctor at St Ursula’s hospital as you try to fit into your new home while balancing work with life. With excellent music and beautiful cartoon-like art, Fall of Porcupine kicks off with a strong first impression, and sets up a very enjoyable, eight-ish hour-long, cosy game.
“But doctor… I don’t have hands…”
The gameplay is a mix of exploration, dialogue, and minigames as you work in the hospital and spend time with friends. The setting of Porcupine and its hospital are filled with interesting side quests. Many involve helping those around the town or learning more about the history of Porcupine. There’s a large variety of minigames to play, although certain ones recur like any mundane hospital tasks would. My personal favourites were the medication matching game and a bar fighting mini game that introduces a fun, turn-based combat system.
Goodness, I hope this town’s secrets are as dark as the ones from Night In The Woods.
As a dialogue heavy game, Fall of Porcupine lives or dies by the quality of its story and characters. The pace can feel a little slow at times but the team at Critical Rabbit crafted some deeply emotional set-pieces and plot points that will really stick with you. The struggles of the characters and the hospital are grounded and the player gets to interact with a variety of patients and neighbours, each with their own unique story.
Despite the well-crafted ambience and fun minigames in Fall of Porcupine, it’s a game that can be difficult to enjoy at times. It has its fair share of bugs. Some are minor, such as an unmovable cursor being on screen when I open menus. However, there were bigger glitches that ruined immersion and enjoyment. The game crashes when it has too much to load and at one point, about four hours in, all the dialogue changed to German and nothing I did would change it back. It was unclear if these issues were due to the game being poorly ported to PlayStation or something else.
“You don’t look to sick. Are you feeling a little horse?”
”…”
”That joke kill with some of my other patients.”
As it stands, I would love to recommend Fall of Porcupine to fans of games like Night in the Woods and Spiritfarer but I would also suggest waiting until the developers have released an update or two to improve stability and deal with some of the glitches that really distract from the experience. Despite the moving story and compelling characters, the bugs in the game can make it borderline unplayable.
