A minigame collection where no-one wins
Back in 2022, a game called Running Fable had a go at disrupting the karting game status quo. While it had all of the expected power slides and item boxes, it did something interesting with the pre-race. You could speckle the track with traps and boons, and take the knowledge of where they were into the race. While the end-result was a little low-fi, it at least approached a stale genre with some big ideas.
We came to Running Fable Petite Party with hopes that Seashell Studio would do the same with minigame collections. The genre is definitely stale – even Mario has been rehashing things of late – and some Running Fable invention could give it a kick up its musty rear.
Where did the innovation go?
Running Fable Petite Party can be played in two different ways. There’s the Board Game mode, which has a punt at the traditional roll-a-dice, play-some-games format that’s been popularised by Mario Party. Separate from that is Minigame Mode, which offers up the full roster of minigames for some free play.
As you would probably hope, up to four people can play Running Fable Petite Party simultaneously. There’s no online play, which is a shame only in the sense that the first Running Fable game had that feature. But four-player couch co-op is entirely possible.
Well, not entirely. Running Fable Petite Party has some real problems when setting up parties of less than four players. It seems to allocate controllers to Player 1, 2, 3 or 4 randomly, and will only let you start a game if the players are chosen in sequence. What we mean is, if you have 1, 2 and 4 randomly allocated to you, you won’t be able to start. You also can’t back out of this menu, so three-player matches often mean a lot of manual restarts. Prepare for some frustration when playing Running Fable Petite Party.
The Board Game mode represents a simplification when compared to other party game collections. Instead of a big board with branching sections, it’s linear and has a minimum of 11 and a maximum of 15 squares (depending on the board you choose). The dice have also been stripped back: you can only roll 1s, 2s, 3s and 4s, with 1 and 2 being twice as likely. The only special squares are a cage and a trap (both of which do much the same thing – holding you in place for a turn) and an egg square, which bumps you forward two spaces and hands you some eggs.
Knowing what Running Fable did for karting games, a kid-friendly dumbing down of party games was something of a shame. It all felt a tad off-brand.
It’s also deeply unsatisfying. Rolling 1s and 2s on most turns is less than empowering. We had one two-player game where we both rolled the same number throughout the entire match, which dampened the excitement. There’s clearly a -1 and a -2 on the dice, as it is shown in the dice animation, but we never rolled it, which made us wonder if there was a last-minute change to remove them due to some rage-quitting. And missing a turn because you’re trapped in a cage sucks, frankly.
For such a distilled version of a classic game, we shouldn’t be listing this many grievances. But they just keep coming: winning a game is based on eggs, but you get so few for actually playing the minigames (play two-player and the winner gets 2 and the loser gets 1) yet you can grab a huge number for the board game stuff: landing on eggs and reaching the end first. We had one two-player game where a player came last in every minigame, but still won thanks to rolling enough fours to reach the end before everyone else. We’ve also experienced crashes at the end of a lot of matches.
Minigames offer some mini fun
Underwhelmed doesn’t quite cover it. But these collections are more about the minigames, and it’s here that Running Fable Petite Party lifts things somewhat. They’re not perfect, but there’s the odd glimmer of fun and invention.
Go to the Minigame mode and the rule-of-thumb is that the higher a game is on the list, the better it is. At the top are games like Fishing Spree, where you each have waggling, uncontrollable fishing lines, and you have to tap A when they – hopefully – align with a fish down below. It reminds me of the Big Sea Fishing game you might have played down the arcades.
For our family, Flag Rally was a favourite. You’re each in paddle boats on a figure-eight circuit. You slalom through arches and get points for doing so, but you can also drop bombs and detonate them with a tap of A. Things descended into a griefing mess as we ignored the slalom and blasted each other into whirlpools.
Roughly half of the games were on the ‘good enough to play repeatedly list’. We did a spot of apple-bobbing, firefly-catching and even stealing from Santa. All of these ranged from pretty good to good enough.
The ‘not good enough to play repeatedly’ list was still sizeable. When you’re allocated minigames randomly in Board Game mode, it’s not a stupendous hit-rate. You can’t avoid some of them.
Battered, broken and confused
They fail for different reasons. There’s Bouncy Webs, which just doesn’t work properly. As you bounce from web to web, a circle is meant to indicate where you land, except it’s way off. A queen spider is meant to descend and make things harder, but she didn’t do anything. She just stared, visibly confused about what on earth was happening.
Running Fable Petite Party loves to chuck a sliding tackle into its minigames, which means you can beat up opponents, stun them and make them drop what they’re carrying. In our experience, with a family of different gaming abilities, it was a nightmare. There were huffs and rage-quits as some wanted to play the game ‘properly’, while others were little trolls. It erred slightly towards mean-spirited. When everything else is a simplification – a family-friendly approach – it doesn’t really add up.
This mismatch of audience keeps catching Running Fable Petite Party out. A racing game, Racing Rampage, is brutal: there are obstacles everywhere. Younger players were just crunching into barrier after barrier. A rhythm action minigame, Tempo Trouble, was way too intricate, requiring precise aiming of the analogue stick while tapping to the music. The best party games are fantastic equalisers: often, Running Fable Petite Party’s games are the opposite.
To give Running Fable Petite Party credit, it did find a home in our family gaming rotation. There are a few minigames that scratch an itch, and I can see us returning to them in Minigame mode. The other 80% of games, and certainly the Board Game mode, will be forever forgotten.
And we just can’t get over how transparent some of the flaws are. We haven’t even mentioned some omissions that every other party collection has dealt with. You can’t pick your character: you can only randomise them. And you can’t choose the challenge level of the CPU bots from the character select, even though they clearly have different ability levels.
Fumbling the Simplification
Most of all, we just can’t help looking at that ‘Running Fable’ prefix and feel a twang of disappointment. The Running Fable karting game wasn’t spectacular, but it was brimful with ideas. We hoped for something similar here.
Instead, we got a simplification of minigame collections, when – arguably – the genre didn’t need a simplification in the first place. In our view, they could have done with some trademark Running Fable invention: the genre needs new ideas, not old ones.
Running Fable fumbles the simplification, which is the kicker. So much screams family-friendly, from the stripped back game boards to the participation awards. But the minigames are bruising, emphasising griefing and, occasionally, complexity.
Fans of Running Fable will be let down, party-game players will find it too stripped back, and families will be embroiled in arguments. Genuinely, we haven’t a clue who Running Fable Petite Party is made for. It turns out that in a race between hare and tortoise, no-one wins.
Important Links
Party Night Or Party Fight? Running Fable Petite Party Brings The Chaos To Xbox – https://www.thexboxhub.com/party-night-or-party-fight-running-fable-petite-party-brings-the-chaos-to-xbox/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/running-fable-petite-party/9p8cn9ws0jq7
