Faerie’s Bargain: The Price of Business
originally posted on Reddit
[This review was originally posted shortly after the game was released, and the text reflects that fact. I have posted it unmodified.]
In Faerie’s Bargain: The Price of Business, Trip Galey has embarked on a magnificent undertaking, a glorious feast of language and imagery, a twisting of history and folklore in a way that testifies to boundless creativity, lucid erudition, and deep love. And for the most part, he succeeds.
For the most part.
There’s a good plot and some intriguing characters, but this game’s strengths lie in the worldbuilding and the sheer ecstasy of Galey’s enchanting prose. If you think of fairy tales as charming little stories about people who live happily ever after, you’re in for a rude awakening here: Galey’s Victorian London - both the mundane city Above and the magical one Below - is driven by some harsh realities, foremost among them greed. Above, factory owners exploit prepubescent laborers; Below, the ruthless goblins and fey of European folklore - the kind of folk who go around tricking desperate mortals out of their firstborns - barter and haggle over such commodities as second chances, true love’s kisses, and strokes of genius. It’s a world by turns comedic, disturbing, and delightful; and it’s always, always surprising.
And Galey has the literary gifts to do it justice. Heaven and earth, that man can write. To say his prose is lush and sensuous, poetic, doesn’t begin to do it justice. He occasionally writes a sentence so beautiful it’ll take your breath away, if you’re the kind of person whose breath gets taken away by a beautiful sentence, and yet somehow, when I look back, it’s not the words that come to me but a flutter of sensations: the whisper of silk, the ticking of a clock, the moist odor of roses and pollution, the glimmer of mirrors and the glitter of gold. And it’s not simply the setting that’s brought to life by the vivid imagery; the PC is, too, as descriptions and metaphors often vary somewhat depending on the background you’ve chosen for your character: where the hunter stalks, the tailor threads their way through.
There’s wordplay, too. Just consider these two sentences: “All around you, other merchants are doing likewise, and you join a growing stream of your fellow fey-folk, flowing without knowing precisely where you are headed. Each holds in their hand a coin, and the subtle tug of it guides you as like calls to like, a gathering hoard.” It could almost lull you to sleep, all that alliteration and growing, flowing, knowing, and then suddenly there’s “headed” where it could have been “going,” and it washes over you like the breaking of a spell. Then, there’s that “hoard” - an error, surely? since of course a mass of people on the move is a “horde.” But wait, they’re being guided to their destination by enchanted coins, and it’s really the coins that are being drawn away together, which would make them, in fact, a hoard of sorts, and ye gods this is brilliant, brilliant!
Ironically, when it comes to the PC’s actions, Galey often seems inclined to tell rather than show. I would choose to have my PC respond to a slight with a devastating witticism, say, and the next page would tell me how my verbal sparring partner responded to his quip, without actually telling me what the quip was. Or I would choose to have him advance his case in an argument by producing evidence, after which I would be informed, without ever being told what the evidence was, whether the listeners found it persuasive. Perhaps it would have bothered me less in a game that didn’t so often sparkle with intelligence and wit, or if it had happened only once or twice, but here I always felt just a tiny bit cheated, especially when it happened several times.
Also, I would be remiss at this time not to point out that this game has a lot of continuity issues. For starters, the game is often a bit sloppy about keeping up with what the PC knows or doesn’t know at any given time. It’s subtle enough that I wasn’t even always sure when it was happening, whether the fault was in my attention or comprehension or whether a thing sounded unfamiliar because I really hadn’t ever seen it mentioned before, but the cumulative effect often had me feeling as if I were trying to follow a movie I’d missed the first twenty minutes of. This kind of error is the hardest to document and report, especially when there’s so much of it. Other continuity errors were far more obtrusive (making a choice that brought me right back to the beginning of the conversation I’d just finished), even game-breaking (as in someone being dead who wasn’t supposed to be, then turning up alive in the next chapter), but I expect those to be corrected quickly. They may well be working on them this very minute. (Okay, probably not literally this very minute, but only because I’m a weirdsmobile who writes reviews in the middle of the night.)
On the strength of my conviction that the most grievous errors will be mended quickly, I’m going to recommend that you buy this game. Personally, I wouldn’t regret buying it even if that update never came - that’s how much I love this game for what it does right. The world of Faerie’s Bargain is a place I just want to be able to visit again and again.
P.S. Whatever goblin is out there supplying Trip Galey with bottles of creative inspiration should feel free to send me a PM. I’m sure there’s a little corner of my soul I could spare in trade.