Fare Thee Well

Sad stories may make people feel bad, but they can also have a good influence on their personality in the long run. As such, there’s much to learn from the misfortune of others, even if the stories in question are actually made up. Naturally, it’s also a bad idea to always subject yourself to unhappy tales, because you might not be able to enjoy yourself at all later on.

Fare Thee Well is a short kinetic visual novel about sadness, tragedy and beauty in which you might just learn something about life. The game was created for a competition, which means that it had to be made over a pretty short period of time, so you shouldn’t expect too much content. The artwork is not particularly striking either, but it’s certainly moody.

The story starts with a man trying to travel through a cold winter night, and he is pretty weary from the snow and the road. As luck has it, he reaches a bar in some quiet town named Cedar, where he manages to warm up a little bit thanks to the kindness of the bartender. However, everything changes when he hears a girl singing a particular song, which is how the whole thing starts.

Given the fact that this is a kinetic visual novel, you do not have to worry about making choices or paying attention to how your character reacts to each event. Thus, the story evolves exactly the same no matter how many times you replay it, which is kind of a bummer. On the other hand, that’s the whole purpose of a kinetic novel, and it’s nice to just sit and listen for a while.

As for the graphics and the artwork, everything looks more or less how you would expect for a game designed in two weeks. The backgrounds are mostly pictures with a few filters on top, but at least the characters are hand-drawn and quite detailed. The music is decent as well, although it seems to oscillate quite wildly sometimes.

In the end, Fare Thee Well can be a tad too slow for most people, but visual novel fans should be able to appreciate the writing and the mood it manages to create. The developers deserve respect for designing the whole thing in such a short period of time.