Fe (2018, Nintendo Switch) Review

A SONG OF ACUTE CUTENESS

Also for: Playstation 4, Windows, Xbox One

It looks peaceful and cute—but don’t be fooled by the visual style of the open-world adventure Fe, developed by Swedish studio Zoink and released as part of EA Originals. It belongs to a familiar category of artsy, visually driven games that deliberately avoid written language, instead relying on world design, color coding, and symbolism to spark curiosity. You’re meant to observe, intuit, and make sense of the world through your senses rather than through exposition.

Unfortunately, this world is overcrowded with bioluminescent, distracting fluff. It’s everywhere—so much so that I often don’t even know what I’m looking at. Although the color palette shifts between purples, oranges, and greens, the effect remains the same. This omnipresent cuteness becomes the game’s sole defining trait, even during moments that should carry tension: hiding from cyclopean monsters or losing newly found allies to the enemy. Fe lacks tonal contrast entirely, rendering the experience flat and monotonous. Even screenshots leave me cold.

You control Fe, a fox-like creature who sprints, leaps, and glides through a glowing, low-polygon landscape in an attempt to understand it. In the opening cutscene, he flies alongside fellow foxes before crashing onto the planet’s surface. His companions are gone, and this is clearly not home. The early game revolves around learning to communicate with unfamiliar animals—deer, birds, worms—through song. By finding the correct tune, you harmonize with them and inherit their abilities.

These interactions allow you to recruit temporary companions who introduce new traversal mechanics. Unfortunately, these lessons feel disappointingly derivative. One ability launches you into the air using flowers. Another launches you into the air slightly differently. A third launches you even higher. While these mechanics feed into light platforming puzzles, the lack of inventiveness makes progression feel underwhelming.

Before long, you encounter the game’s antagonists: a dark, cyclopean force known as the Silent Ones. Their gaze can trap you if you’re careless, reinforcing the game’s persistent ocular themes. With no direct means of combat, stealth is your primary option—unless you manage to enlist powerful animal allies. It’s a promising idea, but one marred by unreliable execution. Supposedly, carrying certain fruits encourages animals to follow you, but in practice this works inconsistently, making the mechanic more frustrating than empowering.

The sound design is one of the game’s few consistent strengths. The string-heavy soundtrack is often excellent, occasionally piercing the saccharine surface with a genuinely soothing tone. Fe’s singing sounds alien and awkward until you hit the right note, which is a clever touch. Singing near monoliths reveals iconographic engravings that hint at past events. Rather than written lore, the game presents symbols for you to interpret. In theory, this should deepen your connection to the world—but I never cared enough to engage with it.

Other collectibles briefly let you control a Silent One in first-person, offering glimpses into their behavior and motivations. In practice, these moments reveal little that isn’t already apparent from observing them at a distance. It’s possible I missed something important, but amid the constant visual overload, these details were easy to forget.

The world itself is dull and, quite literally, too dark to read clearly. Its layout is repetitive and unintuitive, making navigation unnecessarily difficult. More often than not, I found myself relying on map markers because the environment is saturated with glowing vegetation. The tree you’re meant to climb is often right in front of you—you just don’t notice it, because it shares the same dark hue as everything else.

More than anything, Fe suffers from vagueness and a lack of direction. You never learn the purpose of your presence on this planet. Are you trying to get home? Searching for your lost peers? Exploring for its own sake? Discovering an alien world can be compelling, but here it’s tied to a wordless, oddly rigid progression. Story beats rarely amount to more than: “This path is now open—follow your new companion and see what happens.”

When Fe harmonizes with an animal, the moment is represented by two glowing orbs slowly merging between them. It’s clear Zoink hoped this sense of harmony would extend through the screen and resonate with the player. The intention is admirable. But no meaningful communication ever took place between me and Fe. This may be the first game I’ve played that left me entirely unmoved from beginning to end. Beneath the soft glow and gentle sounds, there is nothing to hold onto. I simply went through the motions.