Instead, the background is instead supplied by Oracle, a wrist watch with the stately voice of Peter Tuddenham, the computer from Blake’s 7. Similarly, much of the writing feels scaled back, as the low number of hot spots means there’s less stuff for Feeble to comment on, and the dialogue trees are oddly short and to the point. Feeble has…well, SAM is awesome, but he’s far from a starring character, and the rest of the supporting cast is strangely bland. Simon the Sorcerer (and Monkey Island and Discworld and such) succeeded because the world was populated with weird and silly characters.
Think of him as a precursor to the HK-47 droid from Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic and you’ll have a good idea about the laughs he can bring.īut while the game is funny, parts of it still feel lacking. He speaks in a gruff albeit overly polite manner, joyfully requesting when and where his skills of destruction are most appropriate. The real star of the show, though, is SAM, a violently psychotic robot with the head of a 70s Battlestar Galactica Cylon, who rolls around on tank treads and wields both a rocket launcher and a gigantic buzzsaw.
#The feeble files dos android
His voice is provided by Robert Llewyllyn, mostly known as the android Kryten from the British sci-fi TV series Red Dwarf, and who provides a sense of politely earnest bewilderment. Feeble’s a likable, sad little chap, regrettably accepting of his terrible fate once he’s arrested, and his journey from weenie to hero is quite endearing. Compared to the Simon the Sorcerer games, which were largely about a snotty teenager belittling fairy tale archetypes, The Feeble Files is a bit more mature, a satirical, tongue-in-cheek story that takes on a very different tone. There’s quite a bit of George Orwell’s 1984 in there, which makes sense coming from Britain, mixed with a little bit of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for good measure. He’s not exactly the best choice for the situation, but he’ll apparently have to do, as he miraculously escapes from prison, uncovers his past heritage, and attempts to liberate his people from oppression. Feeble hasn’t quite realized it yet, but he’s been recruited as part of The Freedom Fighters, a rebel group that seeks to liberate society from the grips of the OmniBrain. But his little life is flung into disarray when he’s blamed for an accident at his job, which is tantamount to treason and causes him to shipped off to a prison colony. He mindlessly works at the Ministry of Uncertainty, in a division which monitors the planet Earth from afar and occasionally makes trips to carve crop circles.
His disposition in his profile is listed as “dumpy”, with an expendability rating of 94%, and he is consciously aware that his name means weak and pathetic. Feeble, of course, is quite happy, him being something of a pushover. Laws are arbitrarily passed by the ruthless bureaucracy, and government sponsored confession booths offer “prizes” to those who would spill their guts for the greater good. It’s a cheery, totalitarian society, where everyone is either forced into happiness via brainwashing or medication, or otherwise plainly killed. Feeble is an alien who lives in an otherwordly society ruled by a presence known as the OmniBrain.
Like Simon, The Feeble Files is pretty funny, but it’s also an overwhelmingly difficult, massively frustrating experience that points to nearly everything that was wrong with adventure game design. While technology definitely played a part in the downfall of the graphic adventure genre, apparently none of the number crunchers looked hard enough at The Feeble Files to see that maybe the quality of the games had something to do with their dwindling popularity. This, of course, led to Simon the Sorcerer 3D, a total wreck of a game, and the complete opposite of what most fans wanted. It flopped, apparently, leaving the publisher to rationalize that 2D gaming was dead, and 3D was the way of the future. The Feeble Files, published in the United Kingdom in 1997, is Adventure Soft’s follow-up to their popular Simon the Sorcerer series.
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