Flat Feet

By Joel Ray Holveck

The intro to Flat Feet was so wildly over the top that I wasn’t sure whether to groan, fire the game off to the recycle bin, or just sit there and hope things got better.

Fortunately they did get better, although the same streak of wildly over the top, tongue in cheek humour is found throughout the rest of the game, so if you're not a fan of this sort of thing it’s perhaps doubtful you'll like Flat Feet much.

You're Jacques, a cat detective, and together with your friend Ralph, a ferret, you solve crime. Still with me? Handled better, the intro could have been amusing but the way it was done here left a lot to be desired. Too slapdash for my liking. Too manic. Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t give you a clue what the game is supposed to be about.

The game starts and… what to do? Good question. I spent some time examining my surroundings, talking to Ralph (comical little fellow with some witty dialogue), wandering around. All without any real clue as to what I was supposed to be doing. I figured that as I was a detective, albeit a feline one, I’d have a case to solve but if that was the case, it sure wasn’t making itself very obvious. There was a phone in the first location but I couldn’t seem to call anyone on it and trying to answer it hit me with the following strange message:

(to Ralph)

"Your voice sounds strange; have you been eating enough bacon?"

So very shortly into the game I was bashing out "H" followed in short succession by "I", "N" and "T". Ah! Turns out I need to recover the tire from the alley and then do a few more things and then the phone will ring and I’ll be given a case.

Hmmm… I can’t help thinking this first part of the game would have been a lot more playable if the phone had rang first and then I’d had to figure out how to leave the starting locations. Doing all the other stuff first (and some of it was nail-grindingly drawn out), make the start seem to really drag.

Making progress through the rest of the case is quite a chore. There are a large number of locations and what to do in most of them is never very straightforward, although there's more than adequate hints system for if, like me, you get stuck. Sometimes strange things need to be done to move matters on – climbing the dinosaur skeleton in the museum allows you to meet the person who wants to hire you. At other times, the game introduces very weak excuses for not allowing a certain action – Ralph will nip to the toilet whenever you press the elevator button in the Transamerica Pyramid and you are unable to enter the elevator without him. Annoyingly when he returns and you hit the elevator button again, Ralph nips off to the toilet again. In fact, he carries on doing this every single time you press the button. The little guy was so annoying I even got tempted to kill him at one point. As a comedy sidekick, he’s frequently amusing but more often than not just plain frustrating.

A few times, the lack of testing shows through. Sausalito features a number of identical art galleries with a number of seemingly identical proprietors, none of whom can be examined or even spoken to. Some of the proprietors have names, others are just referred to as ‘proprietor’. There's also the annoying fact that if you head to Sausalito too early in the game, you can render it unfinishable as you can only cross the Golden Gate Bridge once. Admittedly, the game does warn you of this (in a roundabout fashion) but surely it would have been better to allow the player to cross and re-cross the Bridge as often as was needed?

But bad points aside, I rather enjoyed Flat Feet. For all its faults, and there were quite a few, it was well written and comical. Logic doesn’t play a very part in it, unfortunately, and quite a few times there were things happening that seemed too forced, and were then attributed to the kind of wacky logic that some comedy games have. Walking up at the Mystery Spot and then being able to walk over the city was a good example, as is the bit where your car appears out of nowhere if you leave off your walk over the city at the wrong time.

But I liked it. It was amusing. It could have been better but, all things considered, it was my favourite game in the Spring Thing.

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