The Faery Tale Life of MicroIllusions
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Some of the most memorable experiences of my childhood are the rare occurrences when my parents rewarded my brother and I with a chance to order a single PC game from the massive J&R Music/Computer World catalog back in the 1980s. We would deliberate about each choice for days, and I distinctly remember thinking that we were in for an experience that significantly deviated from the ones we'd had with other RPGs of that era when we chose MicroIllusions' The Faery Tale Adventure: Book I. As it turns out, we were, and so it's with a healthy helping of nostalgia that I read through this excellent retrospective piece on The Digital Antiquarian:
The Faery Tale Adventure is the story of three brothers who set out to save their village of Tambry from an evil necromancer. Their quest will require one or more of them if you get one of them killed, you automatically take the reins of another to traverse the vast world of Holm from end to end, a process that by itself could take you the player hours of real time if journeying entirely on foot. Whilst traveling, you must also fight monsters and assemble the clues necessary to complete your quest.
It's difficult to convey using words just how lovely and lyrical your journeys around Holm can be. Even screenshots don't do The Faery Tale Adventure justice; this is a game that really must be seen and heard in action. Here, then, is just a little taste, in which I take a magical ride on the back of a giant turtle to visit a sorceress in her crystalline lair.
If it's difficult to fully describe the experience of playing The Faery Tale Adventure using words, it's doubly difficult to explain just how stunning it was in its day. Note the depth-giving isometric perspective, still a rarity in games of the mid-1980s. Note the way that characters and things cast subtle shadows. And note how the entirety of the world is presented at the same scale. Gone is the wilderness/town dichotomy of the Ultima games, in which the latter blow up from tiny spots on the map to self-contained worlds of their own when you step into them. In The Faery Tale Adventure, if it's small (or big) on the outside, it's small (or big) on the inside. I'd also tell you to note the wonderful music, except that I'm quite sure you already have (assuming you have the sound turned on, of course). Seldom has music made a game what it is to quite the extent it does this one.
Leaving aside the goal of actually solving the game, which is kind of hopeless we'll get to that in a moment The Faery Tale Adventure is all about the rhythm of wandering, following roadways and peeking into hidden corners as the music plays and day turns to night and back again. Like another early Amiga landmark, Defender of the Crown, and unlike far too many other games on this platform and others, it has a textured aesthetic all its own that's much more memorable than the bloody action-movie pyrotechnics so typical of games then and now. Play it just a little, and you'll never, ever forget it.
