Nerd Girl Thoughts

Developer: Wooden Monkeys
Release Date: July 21, 2021
MSRP: $19.99

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Song of Farca is basically a point and click adventure with all the dullest and most irritating aspects stripped away. You play as Private Investigator Isabella Song, who is just returning to work after a period of being banned from internet use while on house arrest. It doesn’t take long to realize how you got into that predicament – Song’s policy seems to be to get the goods by whatever means necessary, and since she still isn’t allowed to leave her house, her means are currently restricted to hacking, research, and interrogations.

Right off the bat, I feel like Song of Farca does itself a disservice by not leaning into being an adventure game, or a visual novel, but by stressing the detective aspects of the game. It seems impossible to keep moving through the story if you miss any clues at all – in fact, just failing to put the right two statements together while speaking to a certain person had me worried that I had soft-locked myself somehow. I encountered a couple of very light puzzles in the course of the first two cases, but mostly, everything in the game can be brute-forced through with trial-and-error.

Which is not to say it isn’t interesting, just not terribly challenging. Sure, this might be due to not getting far enough into the game to see the difficulty ramp up; I played for just over an hour and HowLongToBeat says the full game takes about 8 hours. There’s also definitely a good dose of adventure game logic present – if you have multiple clues or conclusions to present to the same character, presenting them out of order is ineffective, and may end up feeling frustrating when you’ve tried absolutely everything else before realizing where you went wrong.

All the information you gather will be accessible via your case file, but the game gives you very little in the way of instruction of how to use that information. Early on, you will probably figure out that Maurice (your AI assistant) is needed to analyze a piece of evidence. In the second case, you again need more information about something, but instead of turning to Maurice again, you’re expected to know you need to return to the client to ask your questions. You will also discover more information than you probably require to solve the case, but it’s unclear if that’s because the writer’s felt that red herrings were required as part of a detective game, or if it’s because there are multiple ways to solve a case (with the one using all learned information leading to the “best” ending).

I’m not entirely sure that I like the way all the parts fit together, but that Song of Farca has enough going for it for me to want to continue with it. Probably my biggest gripe was laid out for me at the very beginning of the game – if Isabella is not sitting at her desk, you cannot interact with the game in any way. It’s annoying in a way that not being able to save and exit mid-conversation is not, specifically because it’s non-interactive (and at least for me, completely uninteresting).

As long as you’re comfortable with the idea that you won’t need to do a whole lot of deducing, there’s an interesting game here. The dialogue is fun, the music fits the theme nicely, and the gameplay feels good most of the time.

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