Looking for Fael Review — Doorways

What would you do if you could travel the multiverse without ever leaving home?

Looking for Fael begins with an ominous phone message: the titular Fael tells you that they seem to have gone missing… inside of their own apartment. Showing up to said apartment reveals a strange scene: the entire apartment seems to be in a state of packing, with boxes piled up and the entire place nearly empty. Oddly, a wire trails throughout the house, connected by strange adapters in key areas, all linked together with some sort of keypad. At every connection point, meticulously placed furniture or items suggest that Fael was undergoing some kind of experiment or ritual. Replicating said ritual, with the help of a Game Boy analog, opens up a multiversal passage through their apartment complex.

Fael’s situation seems all the more serious as you begin traveling from room to room, reality to reality, replicating the steps taken to get them lost in the first place. Each room is both another universe, unique in both decor and physics, as well as a puzzle in and of itself. In addition to these puzzles, you’ll often be solving little puzzle mini-games built around a sort of bootleg game of Tetris, a lock solved by scooting blocks into the right order. If I’m being honest, this particular puzzle got a little boring, and I wasn’t a fan of its repetitive nature throughout an otherwise fairly diverse set of puzzles to solve. Thankfully, these sections are paced so that they only really show up at the end of a level, and as a sort of capstone to what you’ve done before, so they don’t take up too much time.

For the most part, I was a fan of the puzzles in Looking for Fael. They weren’t incredibly hard, but often required a fair deal of thought, to the point where I never thought I was breezing through the game. In fact, it took me quite a bit of time to notice that each room you enter, and the puzzle associated with it, was actually rather short, demanding enough deduction that the time commitment was disproportionate to the size of the area.

That being said, I wasn’t a fan of the fact that Looking for Fael really demands that you keep physical notes. More than a few puzzles in the game require you to write something down or, worse, outright memorize a pattern or draw a picture, and the game itself doesn’t provide you with any journaling mechanic to do so. It even tells you at the start of the game to have a notebook set aside. While I’m sure some would-be sleuths enjoy this mechanic, I found it to be unnecessarily tedious, and found myself wondering if it was an excuse for the developers to pad out the time it took to solve many of the game’s puzzles, which would have certainly gone quicker if not for the need for constant backtracking to, say, check a pattern displayed in another room.

At times, Looking for Fael can be really relaxing. A sense of calm can easily rush over you as you wander through the strange, alien, but not hostile or off-putting dimensions impossibly connected to the apartment. At other times, the ambiance can be downright unsettling, and I think the game strikes this balance on purpose. It feels like you’re in a place you’re not supposed to be, even if nothing is stopping you from being there, and while at times that can feel exciting and adventurous, you are inevitably reminded by the fact that, oh, right… I’m not supposed to be here, a realization that can make you feel unwelcome and small on a cosmic level.

While Looking for Fael is, by no means, a horror game, I wish it committed to the aforementioned eerie vibe a bit harder. When it is present, the game really shines, but in other areas it feels like it might be taking its own plot a little less seriously. I mean, if I found myself lost within an infinite dimension stretching out of my own apartment, I would be, frankly, terrified. While this is a complaint, I’ll admit that it is a relatively small one, because the game does feel fairly consistent in tone and the areas where it suffers are fewer and far between.

Fewer and far between are also my complaints with Looking for Fael, which I’ve essentially covered in full already. The need for physical note-taking, I think, takes away from the experience and at times feels like a crutch used to extend the life of the game, and the tone could be taken a bit more seriously at times. Beyond that, I really don’t have anything bad to say about the game: it is a solid puzzle title with a solid story and one that I think will easily entertain fans of the genre. The length of the game is quite good for the price, and all I would really critically see changed is the addition of an in-game journal or note-taking system.

TryHardGuides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Looking for Fael. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Looking for Fael is available on Steam, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch.