Welcome Time Wasters!
In a peaceful forest inhabited by fairy folk, a fissure divides the ground and up from it leaks out a corruption that seeps into the flowers and trees. It slowly infects them and turns them into dangerous enemies or uninhabitable grounds. With this corruption also come creatures that seek to spread it, and the fairy folk have to push this corruption back into the earth unless they want to lose their homes and lives. They do this by using a blue crystal that drives the corruption back and makes the forest what it once was. This, my Time Wasters, is the story of Hairy Tales.
A game not all that different from Lemmings, the player must guide the fairy (who I swore was a caveman when I first saw it, guess that explains the ‘Hairy’ part right?) down a path to safety, clearing corruption along the way. The fairy, of course, will just run in a straight line unless you tell him to do otherwise with arrows, fences, and other obstacles that will change his course or location. Fortunately there are several mechanics that allow you to move things into place a bit more easily.
The world on which your fairy runs is floating in the sky, and so one of the big things you can (and must) do is move pieces around. Whether this means moving one of the pieces into a completely different spot or just rotating it so that the arrows and fences point another way all depends on the puzzle. Not all blocks are moveable though; that would be too easy. The end gate, heavily corrupted pieces, or just anything that has an important item on it (like the corruption clearing stone or garlic) cannot be moved, only rotated. Something that makes Hairy Tales a bit more challenging is that you have to move pieces around while the fairy’s moving on them, not while he’s just standing still. And when you have to move multiple ones mid-run, you better move fast.
Don’t worry though, it isn’t hard to pick up on what things can and can’t be done. Not that you have to worry about that in the first few levels where there are tutorials explaining the things you can do. But if you run across something that isn’t explained, you have three lives to test things out with. I did a few bits of testing myself when I saw a new mechanic pop up that I wasn’t sure about.
Unfortunately not everything was all good going during the game. Well, only one thing mainly. The lack of tutorials really hit hard when a level boss showed up, and there was a lot of guessing and testing involved (as well as a lot of running around, not sure of what to do to defeat said boss). The rest of the levels with little mechanic changes or add-ons were fine without tutorials, but where certain things needed to be done in a specific way, a bit of a hint would have helped (other than the hint of ‘defeat this boss’ that is).
But that’s really my only complaint with the game. The rest of the game’s mechanics and aesthetics were just fine: the controls worked properly, the music was nice, and the graphics went passed my initial expectations and were very pleasing to the eye. There was a certain charm about the game that grows on you once you play it for a while, and it won’t hurt you puzzle players out there to give this one a look.
Hairy Tales receives 3.5 GiN Gems out of 5!