I consider myself to have a really nice photographic memory sometimes, though I will admit that unless I watch something over and over, I won’t be able to quickly remember. However, I really enjoy those minigames where you must quickly watch something and then answer, so how about a game where the entire point is to quite literally find the “odd thing out”? Well, that is exactly what BeXide’s The Fox’s Way Home is all about.
The Fox’s Way Home – Is this the Truth or a Lie?
The Fox’s Way Home begins its story with a nameless protagonist who gets lost in a mystical forest. Inside is a foxy-like shrine maiden, who says that there is a dancing ritual, which can open the way home. This ritual lasts roughly one and a half minutes. During which, the player must pay close attention to quite literally everything, from the way the dance looks to even the appearance and clothing of the shrine maiden, because afterwards, the true challenge begins.
The shrine maiden says that she will perform the dance eight more times. However, this time there are “Mononokes”, or that is to say, impostor spirits, will attempt in leading you astray and disrupt the ritual, where there’s something that will look off, such as an item lodged somewhere in her clothes, a mark in her body, and sometimes, these anomalies will attempt to disrupt the ritual via the background.
Should you think you’re watching the impostor, you’ll need to press on the Fake button by pressing X on the PlayStation controller, and then use the stick to point a cursor on what exactly is wrong with the scene. You can’t just simply point at a random part of it, but it is rather lenient on where it considers to be the “correct” part. This is where you really must rely on your photographic memory to be able to properly discern if the dance you’re watching is real, or not.
Finding The Impostor 65 Times
The Fox’s Way Home features an Apparition Encyclopedia, with fully voiced excrepts of the mononokes you’ve found throughout your playthroughs. In total, there are 65 mononokes to find, plus an extra if you can find every single one. You also get to listen to a snarky comment from the shrine maiden about this change, and they’re all rather comical.
Each playthrough session takes quite literally less than 20 minutes to complete. And this is mostly due to the fact that the moment you get one of your deductions wrong, you’re forced to start from the beginning. Each Apparition is rated a difficulty, from one star to three stars.
Seriously, the three-stars are a real doozy to find. They have such subtle changes, and even some of the two-star difficulty parts show that they’re fakes at the very last second of the dance. It can get really repetitive to play the game over and over, especially since it’s completely random on which apparition is the one that will appear, and yes, it is possible to get apparitions you’ve already seen before.
There’s no way to get any hints regarding on specific Mononokes you’ve yet to find, except for a counter where it shows how many times that spirit did appear, and how many times you’ve correctly guessed it. On your first playthrough, you’ll be in a mode where you are limited to only the one-star difficulty Mononokes, but even in the later unlockable Fox Trial mode, it’s just a matter of luck on whether you’ll get all of them.
The Fox’s Way Home is a Short Deduction Game That Feels like an Extra Mode
The Fox’s Way Home is definitely decent, and really engages the player into paying attention. Still, I wouldn’t even treat this as a fully-featured game, seeing as its sole gameplay can get a bit boring and repetitive really quickly, and playing for too long can quickly lead to you just getting tired of the same music loop. There’s basically no story to it.
For what it’s worth, though, the game does do what it says on the tin really well. I can see this being a cool minigame in a compilation, but for $15.99? Honestly, you’re probably better just saving a bit more to buy say, Yohane the Parhelion: Numazu in the Mirage, another game by the same developer and publisher, or something else, and I can guarantee that you might have more fun than just playing “spot the difference” for hours on end.
