Faery - Legends of Avalon

I went into this one expecting a throwaway budget RPG with a pretty coat of paint, and the paint is genuinely impressive. Spiders' debut game drops you into a world built from layered mythology: you play a customizable faery or elf awakened by Oberon himself, then sent through magical mirrors to save dying realms that are fading because humans have simply stopped believing in magic. That premise alone is more interesting than half the chosen-one setups I've sat through this year. The four worlds you visit are the real highlight. Each one is drawn from a different mythological tradition: Yggdrasil, the Flying Dutchman ghost ship, a desert city of djinn, and a crumbling metropolis balanced on the back of a giant scarab beetle. Because your character is roughly six inches tall, birds are bigger than you, ants are the size of lapdogs, and the human ghosts you encounter are towering giants. Navigation is done entirely by flight, no running, no walking, just full 3D aerial movement through levels that are as tall as they are wide. That flight system is, without question, the most original design decision in the game, and it genuinely works. Combat is a turn-based action-point system: each character starts with one action point per turn and grows to three, spending those points on basic attacks, single-target spells, area abilities, or defensive moves. Elemental resistances matter here more than the difficulty suggests, fire burns over time, lightning hits with higher critical frequency, and ignoring a resistance can cut your damage significantly. You recruit party members like Bert the Troll, who tanks, or healers and ranged casters, mixing and matching gear sets that each tie into a specific playstyle. On paper that sounds reasonable. In practice the combat is rarely threatening, the difficulty never climbs high enough to make those elemental considerations feel mandatory, and there is no mana bar to pressure your resource decisions. The English localization also has real problems: garbled spelling, mismatched NPC names in quest text, and dialogue that makes the story feel like it was run through three translation passes. None of it is unplayable, but it stings when the underlying world lore clearly had a writer who cared. The quest design is the other structural problem. Faery makes you interrogate every NPC repeatedly to trigger the next objective, objects will not appear on the map until you have asked about them specifically. That gate system was tiresome in 2010 and it hasn't aged into a quirk. The mainline campaign runs roughly six to ten hours, and a good chunk of that is fetch work that the game itself isn't embarrassed about. There are occasional branching solutions, a peaceful route or a fight route, and some of those choices carry relationship consequences with NPCs, but the writing rarely gives those consequences enough weight for them to land as satisfying moral moments. Choices exist, they just don't resonate the way you want them to. For the right player, this is genuinely worth your time. If you want a compact, low-pressure RPG with a visual identity unlike almost anything else in the genre, folklore-rooted worldbuilding, a legitimately inventive movement system, and the patience to overlook repetitive quest structure and shallow combat, Faery delivers something rare: a game made with obvious affection for its source material. If you need deep build variety, sharp writing, or a final boss that feels earned, look elsewhere. Spiders went on to make much more mechanically complete RPGs after this one, but you can see the DNA here, the instinct for atmosphere and world-craft that would eventually produce better things.

Monika · Scout Team

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