Zabugorie: The Fairy Planet Demo

No one really gets upset at adventure games going off the reservation, because a strange story has the potential to stick with you for a long time. The weirdness makes for some interesting puzzles and quests, not to mention the characters and the dialog between them. However, weird is not always good, because it’s always possible to do things the wrong way.

Zabugorie: The Fairy Planet is the kind of game that barely makes any kind of sense, but not in a good way. While it is a classic point-and-click adventure title, things are not as straightforward as they usually are in the genre. In fact, nothing is very clear from start to finish, especially when the first spoken line is uttered by one of the characters. If you keep going in spite of that, things don’t get any better along the way either.

The story is very difficult to pinpoint and explain, even if it is detailed in text form if you decide to check the help menu. As such, everything revolves around an alien that comes to the planet Zabugorie and crashes his flying saucer. In the commotion, a valuable chest flies from his ship, which prompts a rescue mission. However, the alien somehow decides to disguise himself as a very sketchy looking human and converse with cats, crows and roosters, in an attempt to find out more about his missing chest.

There are very few tips on the gameplay mechanics as well, and not even those make sense anyway. In essence, you have to explore the surrounding area and interact with the characters in order to advance, but since there are no guidelines and the interface is problematic, things are much more disorienting than they appear. The current quest/mission is not displayed anywhere, and you just have to guess what the next move is.

The situation is not much better if you try to look at the technical aspects either. While the graphics are arguably the best part of the game, at least when it comes to the environments, you need a lot of patience to put up with the voice acting. It is by far one of the most cringeworthy things you can stumble into in the genre, and it sincerely sounds like every voice was made by a single person, who’s not very good with either of them.

With all these being said, it’s difficult to recommend Zabugorie: The Fairy Planet to anyone, regardless of how bored or tolerant you might happen to be. Hence, you would be much better off playing an old classic instead, because this is not worth the bother.