Fall Of Porcupine review – animal hospital

Fall Of Porcupine makes you part of its medical drama, casting you as a junior doctor called Finley who’s just moved to the small town of Porcupine to work at St Ursula’s Hospital. Finley is a pigeon, and he works with a collection of colourfully drawn animals including the receptionist hippo, Ingrid; his snooty supervisor, a snow leopard called Dr Krokowski; and a wider supporting cast of various species, some friendly, some not.

St Ursula’s itself is in a state of managed decline, despite the efforts of the financially-orientated cockerel that runs it. While you do your best with the cavalcade of patients that appear in your wards, there’s an overarching sense that destiny isn’t far away, and that it’s not going to be joyous. Moment to moment though, you’ve got rounds to perform under the watchful gaze of Dr Krokowski.

Presented in delightful, hand drawn 2D, you explore the town and do your job on a single, simple plain, with doorways and entrances leading to more side scrolling rooms. Finding your way around isn’t particularly complicated but the game’s dialogue is naturalistic rather than overly directive, so if someone asks you to meet them somewhere you need to pay attention, your only clue being the bevy of suddenly locked doors that herd you in the right direction.

The work itself is played out in a series of basic mini-games, some of which work better than others. Changing wound dressings by pressing and holding buttons as they appear on screen, forcing you to do a sort of hand-based game of Twister on your controller, is possibly the strongest but we never fully got to grips with the poorly engineered rhythm action game used to represent a number of other procedures.

Along with practicing medicine, you’ll also be doing a great deal of walking around, your small pigeon doctor moving at an amiable trot that means it takes ages to get from one place to another. With the town’s long streets simply drawn, and with almost no interactive features, this can be pretty dull, which is a problem given that the majority of your time is spent either walking or engaging townsfolk and patients in text-only conversation.

Those exchanges are very well written, its characters expressing themselves with great clarity, in chats that range from pointed talks with patients about their conditions to a world of idle banter that has no particular goal or focus. That’s great for a while, but the sheer volume of warm but essentially pointless text you have to read does eventually start to grate. It may be well written, but it has absolutely no respect for your time.

And for a game with such simple graphics and un-taxing gameplay, there’s a lot of glitches. There are typos in the text and innumerable moments where text appears half off the screen. At the same time, characters keep walking into obstacles or wander off along a path they’re not meant to, while your mobile phone – which provides a dramatis personae of townsfolk and your daily hospital to-do list – regularly fails to respond as intended. We even came across a couple of game breakers that forced us to quit and reload the game.

The story, told in its signature meandering form, is about the gradual breakdown of medical services under the cold-hearted pressure of economics. While that’s a message primarily aimed at America, there are plenty of signs that the NHS is under more pressure than just underfunding, and delineating these issues using cute cartoon animals makes them no less devastating.

There’s an undoubted joy in repetition. Every day you get up, go to the hospital, chat to Ingrid the hippo on your way in, head to your ward, and do your rounds. Some patients leave, others arrive, while long term residents become familiar friends, a position you soon discover is painfully precarious.

You also get to know your colleagues and friends better, their facades gradually peeling away to reveal their characters. It’s done in such a charming way that when the emotional punches come, they land pretty hard. The issue, though, is that while controlling Finley and completing medical mini-games there’s very little choice in what to do, either in dialogue or plot.

A scattering of conversations include an optional response or two, but none carries any particular narrative weight, meaning your entire career at the ailing St Ursula’s is effectively on rails. It makes the long walks from A to B and back again, and the endless conversational fluff about nothing in particular, feel like padding in what is at heart a fairly slight tale.

With so little choice in what you do, your participation is often reduced to pressing a button to advance reams of text, which fails to take advantage of the sense of involvement that makes video games so compelling.

Despite its lovely art style, beautifully formed prose, and important central message, Fall Of Porcupine is dragged down by its mechanics. The mini-games are bland and the endless traversal no more than filler, a sense compounded by the extraordinary number of conversations that exist purely for their own sake. It’s a game with a good heart but without a bit more polish, and some judicious editing, it fails to be an entertaining experience in its own right.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £15.99
Publisher: Assemble Entertainment
Developer: Critical Rabbit
Release Date: 15th June 2023
Age Rating: 12