Song of Farca is a game in which you play as a freelance hacker under house arrest who takes jobs for various people and organizations. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t dig into the details too much before requesting a key; I remembered developer Wooden Monkeys from Save Koch, their entertainingly ambitious (but confusingly unwieldy) previous game that similarly featured a character stuck in a room, and I was interested in seeing a more mature take on that concept. Song of Farca ends up being a massive improvement. By dropping Save Koch‘s randomly assigned villain and giving the player more agency, the story is able to zoom in on a small cast of interesting characters and develop in a surprisingly compelling way.
Song of Farca‘s dialog has its share of quirks but ends up being genuinely engaging
You play as Isabella Song (Izy to her friends), a young hacker under house arrest. When the game first starts, she’s just got her internet connection back so that she can resume working, and she ends up taking on several cases that require hacking into areas and piecing together what happened.
Save Koch‘s central gimmick of being stuck in a room carries over into Song of Farca, then, but you’re no longer forced to send subordinates to solve problems. Instead, Izy can hack into surveillance cameras, do web searches for characters to reveal information about their pasts, and then use that information to arrive at conclusions that push conversations ahead. This allows you to gradually become more familiar with the game’s cast of characters in a very organic way. It also allows many of them to be very likable. Like Save Koch, this game takes place in a corporate dystopia, but Song of Farca‘s tone strikes a welcome balance between seriousness and humor that feels more like a hyper-profane version of Phoenix Wright.
Song of Farca‘s sense of humor is one of its greatest assets. The world is on the precipice of being a full-blown cyberpunk dystopia, but the profanity and violence become more palatable every time Izy has a conversation with an AI named Maurice that she designed. Maurice is perpetually confused by the oddities of the human experience, and yet he’s a massively powerful program that can often dredge up crucial information while pointing out the inherent absurdities of situations.
Much like in the Phoenix Wright games, characters recur between jobs. Few are as entertaining as Maurice, but Isabella becomes close to a couple of the more lovable ones regardless while others simply become contacts she can leverage for information. By building up most of these relationships over the course of the story, Isabella ends up having plenty to lose, which allows the tension to build up believably.
Several of her jobs require wronging the corporations and criminal elements who run the city, and it’s never obvious exactly how they’ll respond. Some may expect a favor. Others may lash out and leave Izy running damage control. The best thing about Song of Farca‘s story is how little of it I saw coming; I wasn’t just surprised by the way the plot developed once, or even twice, but on several occasions. That’s one of the biggest draws of a hand-designed story, and while this approach means that you have a limited amount of agency over how things develop (there appear to be two endings, with one of the endings having a secret extra part that requires finishing a few cases in specific ways), it’s an incredibly strong story.
That’s not to say that I don’t have any criticisms, though. Some of the conversations include peculiar phrasing, almost like some of the language peculiarities were translated verbatim from Russian to English. This isn’t a constant problem or anything, and deducing the intention of a line from the surrounding context is simple enough. These slightly confusing bits just stand out because everything else is so solid and engaging.
The gameplay doesn’t evolve much, but I appreciate being able to do the dirty work
One of the more annoying parts of Save Koch was your inability to interact with the world outside of telephone calls and delegating tasks to your subordinates. Without knowing in advance who was good at what, they’d inevitably die and your whole playthrough would quickly snowball into a bloodbath. That’s why Song of Farca‘s hacking is so refreshing to see; most of what you’ll be doing is clicking around to learn new details and hacking cameras and other electronic equipment to scope out areas, but being in control of the action is a massive improvement. And while this does eventually become repetitive, the tight pacing and interesting stories help to paper over that particular criticism. Overall, I liked the gameplay.
It’s mostly the way the gameplay ends up being used that I appreciate. Things like your inability to answer video calls when Izy is away from the computer. The screen is constantly separated into a top half that shows what Izy and her dog are doing and a bottom half that represents her computer screen, which isn’t always a great setup if you need to get to a menu to quickly exit the game, but I can’t think of anything else like it in terms of immersion. Novelty isn’t the kind of thing that everyone will be able to appreciate. Still, I’ve played enough same-y games to appreciate those that are a departure from the norm.
Song of Farca‘s jobs begin with a phone call from the client, after which you either have a place to investigate or a phone number to call. Locations are investigated by hacking cameras, drones, and cleaning robots and then using them to read documents or find physical evidence. Phone calls usually consist of peppering characters with questions until they clam up, at which point you have to produce one of those pieces of evidence or create a theory from pairs of details that you learn to get them to open up. It’s not always obvious which specific thing pushes the story forward, but you have unlimited chances most of the time, and some conversations can even proceed in multiple ways.
If there’s one thing holding the gameplay back, it’s the barrage of nonsensical puzzles
Song of Farca is great, but its puzzles were at risk of putting me off of the entire experience. These puzzles eventually show up in every mid-to-late game mission, and they get to the point where they’re so coded that deciphering their meaning is impossible. The way it works is that you’ll be investigating an area, only to encounter a safe or some other object that requires a four-digit code. You can’t proceed until you’ve obtained this code, and the only clue is a mysterious drawing that’s sometimes connected to other weird notes that you find. The problem is that each picture can be interpreted in a variety of different ways, leading to a bunch of different codes, and there’s rarely a hint nudging you in the correct direction.
And sometimes the logic simply doesn’t hold up. There’s one picture of an animal with numbers on its antlers and four sets of directions, and you’re clearly supposed to use them to move back and forth and obtain the code that way. Except that it’s never obvious where you’re counting from. If you assume that you’re counting from the forehead, which is how most puzzles would do this, you get the wrong code.
Instead, directions that start with movement to the left side begin on the number closest to the forehead on the left side while directions that start with movement to the right side begin on the opposite side. How are you supposed to know to start in different spots? Most of these puzzles are opaque and random like this. This became such a problem that a developer had to put up a guide that provides extra clues, then just provides the answer. After realizing that each new puzzle would be a brick wall of indiscernible nonsense, I stopped even bothering to try. I have no regrets—keeping things moving is massively important to the pacing, and you’re going to enjoy Song of Farca a lot less if you’re constantly getting stuck on random moon logic puzzles.
I like Song of Farca‘s art style, but it’s the soundtrack that stands out the most to me
Song of Farca has the kind of colorful art style that appeals to me, but it does suffer from Izy being stuck in a single location for the entirety of the game. This is less of a problem than in Save Koch because most calls are video calls, allowing you to see the ornately-dressed cast of characters, but you still spend most of the game looking at interior maps. Instead, it’s the soundtrack that steals the show. You can freely select what track is playing from a list like in VA-11 Hall-A, which usually robs the story of that defining moment where music is deliberately chosen to match the mood. However, that moment comes in the Song of Farca‘s final chapter, which pairs an emotional confrontation with music that perfectly matches the moment. It’s the best of both worlds, then. And it doesn’t hurt that the soundtrack is great. The menu music has a bit of a Deus Ex vibe to it.
Story: 3/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 2/2 ★★★★★★★★☆☆ – 8/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean
*A Steam key was provided for this Song of Farca review. My first playthrough took 8.8 hours, plus an extra 3.5 or so that I’ve spent exploring different choices to see what effect they have on the story.
Song of Farca review – An absorbing corporate dystopia first appeared on Killa Penguin
