There is a school of thought in modern corporate management that motion inherently equates to action. That if you look busy, you must in fact be busy. And that in order to be busy, you have to tell everybody how very busy you are. This is, of course, completely ridiculous to anybody who hasn’t had the complimentary lobotomy bestowed alongside the typical MBA. It’s clear that the folks at The Planar Danse firmly believe if you’re moving, you’re doing something, as evidenced by their latest release, The Fool’s Apprentice.
Borrowing elements of Dungeon Keeper, Majesty, and the Harry Potter series, The Fool’s Apprentice puts you in charge of a magical school known as a Conservatory. It is your job to recruit would-be mages into your charge, teach them about magic, and hopefully have them survive the experience. Or at least that’s what’s promised on the store page. It technically delivers that gameplay loop, but it is in no way enjoyable.
From a visual perspective, The Fool’s Apprentice suffers from some questionable aesthetic choices. On the one hand, you’ve got some very interesting texture work and nifty special effects. The animation for characters walking (or sneaking in the case of thieving goblins) as well as one particular element of the Conservatory is very nicely done. On the other hand, the UI suffers from an excessively stylish font that is mostly legible, but far too busy visually. Worse, certain UI elements are not well labeled, particularly in the Research section. Sure, you can try to decipher all the symbols involved, but it just feels gratuitously insulting. And given that you’re confined to a diorama of sorts, the disconnect between tasteful furnishings and irritating UI elements is aggravating.
Sound might be the best part of The Fool’s Apprentice, and that’s not saying much. There are a number of sound effects which are cleanly recorded and well synchronized to the action on screen, but since the actions themselves aren’t particularly satisfying, the effort seems kind of wasted. As far as the musical score, it leans towards the symphonic, but none of the tracks are particularly noteworthy or catchy. They neither set a mood nor do they move the player emotionally. They’re present without having any presence.
This brings me to the gameplay for The Fool’s Apprentice, and not to sugarcoat it, but this is perhaps one of the most infuriating experiences I’ve had. Not because of obtuse systems and poorly implemented mechanics (though they are present). There’s just not any real substance to any of it. It’s not difficult to drag in a student and enroll them, get them starting on researching, and watch them either die in some bizarre accident or get bored and quit. With something like Majesty, you at least had an obvious problem which needed solved and the mechanism to solve it was both simple and effective. Here, what’s effective to keep your students interested isn’t explained and there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism in place to fulfill those interests. Build desks, build workstations, whoops! Now you have a student who’s not bored anymore because they’re dead. And it means… virtually nothing at all. Management games where you don’t have direct control of the units can be enjoyable where there’s personality infused into them and when emergent storylines create a connection between the player and a given unit. Here, it’s a fantasy skinned version of a running gag from the sitcom Dinosaurs: “We’re going to need another Timmy!” We have no connection to any of these randomly generated people. We drag them in and hope for the best.
Improving the Conservatory isn’t terribly difficult from a purely mechanical standpoint. Buy an item, use the Levitation spell to position it, and back to the grind. The amount of items which are locked off (and poorly explained on how to unlock) doesn’t help, however. With enough time spent and research ground out by hapless students, you can unlock the different rooms in the Conservatory, all of which have bonuses or penalties to learning different fields of magic. If you’re very lucky, you can even earn Research Points (assuming your students survive long enough to find something useful), which ostensibly provide bonuses of some sort. But again, the complete lack of connection to the students renders a lot of this completely moot. If we don’t care about the students, why the hell would we care about the research? Simply saying that it’s the objective of the game isn’t enough. Compounding this is the complete lack of a save mechanism. The Fool’s Apprentice tracks stats (how many times a spell has been cast, how many apprentices have died, etc.), but it doesn’t have any way to save your progress. Every time you start up, you’re starting over. Your research, your students, your Conservatory, all back to nothing. Even mobile games are more respectful of the player’s time than this. And after about the second or third attempt to try and keep things going, you realize how much of a joyless and nihilistic slog the whole exercise is.
From my perspective, both as critic and as player, The Fool’s Apprentice is not a game. It’s barely a demo, and not even a particularly well-thought out demo, either. What rouses my ire so greatly, when I’ve played games with more technical and design shortcomings than this one, is that the developers have the temerity to charge people real money for this. At a time when every spare dollar is dear, this grotesque insult dares to come out and demand people pay for something which completely and absolutely fails to respect the player. I’ve been disappointed before, but this one just has me livid.
Axel reviewed The Fool’s Apprentice on PC with a provided review copy.
