The puzzles in Fixfox are puzzling. While you would think that should be a given, recent titles such as Biomutant and No Place Like Home shows how difficult it is to balance casual gameplay with enough challenging content to keep players engaged.
I would have enjoyed Fixfox more as a series of puzzles than I did as a rather bland open-world experience, as while the puzzles in FixFox do not require mensa level IQs, they require critical thinking skills and encourage the player to find creative solutions to problems.
Image credit FixFox - Published by Joystick Ventures and developed by Rendlike.
One of FixFox’s greatest weaknesses is its insufferably “funny” dialogue; like the uncle at a Christmas party who won’t accept he isn’t the funniest person in the room, FixFox’s narrative dialogue is filled with puns, repetition, bad jokes, and for the most part, seems to be entirely unaware just how annoying the near-constant attempts of humour will be for the average gamer.
While many NPCs have awful cliche and pun-filled dialogue, the worst offender by far is Tin, the robot companion of the player character; within moments of meeting the annoying bot, I knew I wouldn’t like them, and that feeling of loathing only grew with each overplayed gag, bad joke and repeated statement.
In one early scene, Tin is convinced the player will stumble upon a space vampire; while the first statement was cute, having Tin continually refer to the danger of space vampires for the entire quest grew tiresome, and I quickly found myself skipping all dialogue entirely after playing for just a few hours.
Image credit FixFox - Published by Joystick Ventures and developed by Rendlike.
While FixFox has a rather large cast of characters, I found each of them rather bland and, for the most part, interchangeable; this blandness is exuberated by the developer’s reluctance to have any truly bad characters in his story, with even the pirate gang being revealed to have good hearts. The evil police-like entity is quickly revealed as well-intended but misguided.
Due to the excessive friendliness of almost every character, no single character appeared sincere or authentic, and I feel the developer’s well-intentioned goal of creating a game where players feel empathy has been derailed by his insistence on making a game where even the bad guys are not so bad after all, friendship is everywhere, and everything is awesome.
Image credit FixFox - Published by Joystick Ventures and developed by Rendlike.
It’s clear that FixFox’s creator Jaroslav Meloun has very strong and passionate views about why wholesome games have a place on the market, and I agree that there is a market for such games; however, if wholesome games are to compete with normal games, the developers of wholesome games need to learn from the mistakes of Christian game developers, who tried and failed to release a slew of low budget video games in the late 90s and early 2000s which were easily some of the worst games of the decade.
Gamers will not play boring or low-quality titles no matter how important your message or how good your intentions are. While FixFox is not a low-quality title, it is boring sometimes, and for many gamers, that will be a deal-breaker.
I would love to see Jaroslav Meloun come back in a few years and offer gamers a wholesome and engaging experience that can stand on its own merits; however, with FixFox performing very poorly on Steam (all-time high of just 27 players online), he may unfortunately not be allowed to do so, which is a shame.
Image credit FixFox - Published by Joystick Ventures and developed by Rendlike.
FixFox was designed, written, drawn, and programmed by one man, Jaroslav Meloun; bringing a title to market, especially one that has managed to attract generally favourable reviews from its target demographic, is no small feat, and Jaroslav Meloun should feel pride in that accomplishment.
FixFox allows players to play with their food, quite literally, while eating has very little influence on the game itself; for some reason, players are given the opportunity to pick up a spoon and eat pudding.
While this isn’t compelling content, it’s noteworthy as I feel FixFox is one of the new non-culinary titles to make eating a bowl of sour cabbage soup an (admittedly easy) mini-game.
Image credit FixFox - Published by Joystick Ventures and developed by Rendlike.
Jaroslav Meloun is a confessed fan of procedural generation. While, in theory, this allows for nearly unlimited potential repair mini-games, no matter how many ways you combine the repair modules, there is no increase in difficulty; a screw is a screw, and a cover is a dusty cover. No matter how elements such as these are rearranged, the repair mini-games quickly grow old. Within about 20-30 minutes of playing, I had already encountered over a dozen mini-games, each being no more (or less) rewarding than the last.
Another area in which FixFox employs procedural generation is scrambling the map between chapters; while this does force the player to rediscover landmarks they have already discovered, it’s more of a time-wasting annoyance than a method of creating engaging content, and I would love to see the developer patch this out as soon as possible.
Image credit FixFox - Published by Joystick Ventures and developed by Rendlike.
FixFox is a adventure video game developed by Rendlike and published by Joystick Ventures, it was released on 31 Mar, 2022 and retails for $14.99.
FixFox is available exclusively on PC.
On average FixFox takes between 11 and 12 hours to complete.
Estimated completion times are derived from various sources and may vary based on the skill level of each player.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
FixFox is rated PEGI 3+ and contains no offensive content.
FixFox is only worth playing if you are desperate for an entirely wholesome, violence-free open-world experience; while the developer of FixFox should be proud of their accomplishment, and FixFox is one of the most content-rich wholesome games on the market, it has very little to offer when compared to “normal games”, and the average gamer will struggle to engage with it.
