Femida is a point and click video game developed and published by Roman Loznevoy
AT A GLANCE
TITLE: Femida
GENRE: Indie, RPG, Simulation
PLATFORMS: PC
DEVELOPER: Art Interactive
PUBLISHER: Roman Loznevoy
RELEASE DATE: 25 Feb 2020
The game is set in the early 40s in a country that has recently overthrown its dictator and a new regime is installed. You are selected as a judge based on a lottery and now travel to the city of Metropolis to start off on your new job. There are multiple endings involved based on your choices, and you are told this right at the beginning of the game.
The game plays out in a similar fashion to games like Orwell, Papers Please and even borrows some mechanics from the Phoenix Wright series. You work on a wide variety of cases and must use the evidence presented to you along with interrogating key people involved to come to a conclusion. Before every case, you can review the evidence and case files in your office which gives it a nice touch of realism.
Every case has a timer, and you can only interrogate witnesses within your allotted time. Every person has a list of questions you can ask them and it’s crucial that you ask the right ones as that will influence the jury’s opinions on the case.
Aside from the cases with their own sub-stories, there’s a larger main plot involved. You are introduced to the moderately large cast in the first couple of minutes into the game. The characters are all well designed, and that goes the same for the overall aesthetic tones of the scenes. The game does a really good job at delivering a neo-noir feel and vibe. Unfortunately, that’s about the only good thing I can say about Femida.
Femida suffers from very poor translation issues and the dialogues fall flat as a result of this. Most of the cases fail to create any form of intrigue or tension due to the often nonsensical and grammatically poor writing. I realize that the game probably had to deal with a very small budget but in a game that is supposed to be story-heavy and primarily relies on text to deliver it, a good translation was a must-have.
Gameplay could have salvaged Femida but even on that side, it feels uninspired and lackluster.
FINAL THOUGHTS
At the end of the day, Femida fails to distinguish itself in any way from the thousands of other point and click games out there. It needed more time, polishing and innovation. There’s very little reason to pick this up unless the developer manages to fix the translation with a complete rewrite and somehow magically overhauls the gameplay.
