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FixFox review: a lovely weird world to live and repair things inLive, fox, fix
Live, fox, fix
MyFixFoxjourney, not unlike that of the titular little furry protagonist Vix, has been abnormally long and strange. I started playing it,then movedand didn’t have a PC for a long time, and it was only recently I finally got my PC back and finished the game last week. It took me around 12 hours of playing the game to travel around a strange cuboid planet using postage stamps to fix hairdryers for robots, but stretched over three months in real life. And reviewing a game this many weeks after release isn’t normal procedure either, but I really like FixFox and I want people who might like it to stand a better chance of finding it. I also think a break of several weeks isn’t the worst way to experience it, either.
FixFox is a top-down adventure that’s part crafting and item collecting, part puzzle, and part story about family and identity. Vix lives in a far future where, in order to survive weather extremes, humans have gene-spliced themselves to become bipedal, talking animals with opposable thumbs. The furry ideal. Vix is a) a fox and b) a mechanic, so puts those thumbs to good use. Unfortunately all Vix’s conventional tools were lost when their spaceship crash landed, so instead you stuff a talking, perpetually anxious toolbox with useful junk that can be traded or found on the planet surface. Plasters and stamps are like tape; a small statue is a hammer; scissors are, well… still scissors, but you have to dig them out of a hole like a city fox going through someone’s bins.
FixFox Story TrailerWatch on YouTube
FixFox Story Trailer
Tripping light fantasticSome of the visuals in FixFox are really great - especially when you’re dealing with stuff to do with information, technology or the AI. Lots of fractals, beautiful geometry, and the collision of art and science in a very cool way.
At the same time, though, the story does require repetitive backtracking that would have probably annoyed me a lot more had I not taken an enforced break from the game. To build a mech, for example, you need to find each of its constituent parts in a junkyard, solve a little puzzle to navigate said yard, and then use the mech to solve another location puzzle that was itself the first part of a similar process. The middle of the story is a few hours of nesting repetiton. I think you have to do 12 junkyards. There are also a few sections in space that are necessary to the plot, yet somehow feel superfluous to play through (an unwelcome cousin to ludonarrative dissonace, which I thought we had strangled to death).
I was not great at keeping my tools organised.
So despite the nagging feeling that FixFox needed an unforgiving editor at some points, Rendlike have made a lovely world to justbein, tootling around on your desert bike, arriving in and out of town, eating nice soup. It’s all about co-operation and being friendly and helping out. And in return the locals like you too! Isn’t that lovely? Yes. Yes it is.
