Foxes Need to Eat made us realise that one of the best mechanics in Pac-Man is also the least stolen. When Pac-Man disappears off one side of the game screen, he reappears on the other. Screen-wrapping is something that we could imagine other games having fun with. Imagine an FPS with a Pac-Man grenade: you chuck it like a flashbang, then walk to the edge of the blast nearest to you, only to teleport to the other side of the blast. We could imagine some dirty tactics coming from that.
Foxes Need to Eat has had similar ideas. On the face of it, it’s an extremely simple platformer. You’re a fox, and there’s an apple on the other side of the level that, apparently, you ‘need to eat’ (a quick Google search shows that, yep, foxes actually do eat apples, although they prefer a mouse or chicken. We’d guess the developers didn’t want you chomping on one of those per level). So, you’re hopping over obstacles to get to said apple.
If it stayed at that, we’d be reviewing one of the most mind-numbing platformers out there. But Foxes Need to Eat has an idea: what if the game screen was a bit like Pac-Man? If you dropped through the floor, you wouldn’t die; instead, you would fall from the heavens. If you jumped through the left-hand side of the screen, you would appear on the right. It’s through these two simple rules that Foxes Need to Eat becomes something a little extra.
The opening levels treat it as a puzzle. Apples are blocked off and seem unreachable, until you wrap your head around the screen-wrap. It’s a simplistic Portal, as you’re thinking in spatially different terms.
But as Foxes Need to Eat progresses, the emphasis is less on the puzzle and more on the precision-platforming. Because there are really only a few ways that you can exploit that mechanic: you can go up through the roof, down through the floor, and on either side of the game screen. It can’t find new ways to leverage the idea to trick you.
And it’s at this point that we got sad. Because the first half of Foxes Need to Eat, although admittedly easy, felt new. This wasn’t a run-of-the-mill indie platformer. There was the satisfying pop of an idea into the head, and then the simple action of pulling it off. We would throw caution to the wind, jump into a hole and then appear in exactly the right position at the top of the screen to go scrumping. While it wasn’t exactly developed by Mensa, there was a satisfaction in manipulating the space to our advantage.
So, when Foxes Need to Eat started to rely less on the puzzling, and more on spinning balls of death and timing jumps around them, well, it all became rather rote. Because we’ve played that game plenty of times before. Too many times before. Foxes Need to Eat became every other action-platformer or precision-platformer, and the luster of newness wore off.
It’s not that the platforming is poor. The arc of the jump is a little low, dragging us to the floor more than we’d like, but generally Foxes Need to Eat performs well. It’s a tidy, well constructed platformer. That’s not the problem.
Nor is the presentation. Again, this is constructed well. It’s colourful and appealing, with earworm tunes and a perky fox character. We had no problems there.
It’s the abundant sense of familiarity that is the problem. There are spikes, thwomps covered in spikes, and revolving balls, again covered in spikes. And that’s it. It’s a simple Mario Maker level with a spike fetish. It needed something more, and that could only mean some development or extension of its screen-wrapping mechanics. Unfortunately, Foxes Need to Eat couldn’t find one.
Without it, Foxes Need to Eat is a reasonably short, easy play across 60 levels. It’s 1000G without breaking a sweat, and not a single memory generated. For all its initial promise, Foxes Need to Eat exits out of the mind as quickly as it arrived. Unfortunately, it doesn’t screen-wrap back into the mind afterwards.
