Key Fairy

A whimsical fantasy metroidvania with Sanabi's gameplay but pacifist

Why

Why Not

Impressions

Key Fairy is a surreal, unique experience which feels like a fairy tale come to life. Rather than fighting 'enemies' you liberate them from corruption by zooming around their attacks with a needle and thread, grabbing the stars they emit until they're freed. They'll then grace you with some inscrutable dialogue trees which occasionally results in a power up or even an alternate 'ending'. There are also plenty of strange and wonderful side characters to chat with, many of whom will ask for something and provide favours like even more endings or unlocking one of the (30) different color palettes.

Speaking of color, the base black & white visual style is amazing. It's what initially drew me to the game, and looks even better in motion with all the strange little animations and the brilliant use of contrast in boss 'fights'. The visuals, soundtrack and dialogue combine to really put you in the shoes of a whimsical fairy traipsing through the forest. One mechanic which stood out was the inevitable torch you obtain to enable navigating interior areas; rather than just passively illuminating the room your movement spawns a trail of flickering, short lived flames which briefly illuminate where you passed. Surprisingly all this style didn't cause the expected visual clarity issues, with few exceptions I was able to track the projectiles flying around well enough to not feel cheated when I took damage.

There are also a bunch of accessibility and assist options to toggle if you're getting hit too much, allowing ample opportunity to customise the experience to something comfortable for you. And you probably will get hit; despite the surprisingly intuitive controls Key Fairy is not an easy game. Luckily checkpoints are reasonably generous and even 'long' runbacks are trivial due to the speed your thread and dash allow. Each enemy has its own quirky attack pattern and timing for star releases to memorise while bosses combine multiple patterns; often at the same time in later stages of the fight.

The only 'downside' to Key Fairy is it's length; I took about 5 hours to roll credits with quite a few of the alternate 'endings' in hand. Some may balk at paying the same price for a 5 hour game that gets you 100+ hours of Silksong, but to those people I say first that comparing anything to Silksong is pointless, and second that you're paying for an experience; not to have your time burned. And in terms of the experience playing through it leaves you with, Key Fairy is well worth the cost in my opinion. It also has a demo, so there's no excuse not to at least give it a try.