Fenimore Fillmore’s Revenge

By Pete Hulme

Ah, point and click adventures – they bring back such good memories. The amount of hours I wasted on my Atari ST trying to complete Operation Stealth, or trying to remember the code that bypassed the age test on the first Leisure Suit Larry, allowing you to see badly drawn naked ladies in their full, pixellated glory. Great fun. So I greeted Fenimore Filmore’s Revenge with a sense of nostalgia and good spirits. For the first five minutes, anyway. After that, the nostalgia and good spirits were replaced by frustration and boredom.

I didn’t know what to expect, but I expected more than a simple, linear point-and-click adventure, using no more than three simple commands (look, use, shoot) to solve puzzles (and I use the term “puzzles” very loosely there) which, when solved, reward (and I use the term “reward” very loosely there) you with cut scenes that keep skipping and lose their sound half way through. You would have thought that, after the storyline and puzzles, there wouldn’t be much to get right in a point-and-click adventure, mainly the pointing and clicking bit. But I soon grew tired of watching my little cowboy not understanding where I wanted him to go, deciding instead to spin around in a circle a few times before finally getting the gist of what I wanted him to do.

Some of the levels take the form of a third-person shooter, which seems like a bit of an afterthought that was tagged on at the end. It doesn’t work at all, and feels far too awkward to be entertaining. Even the little grammatical mistakes (“look at the Bill Carson”) give off a feeling that there has been no thought put into this game whatsoever. But the thing that really got me is how anyone can justify spending £18 on a game this poor, when only two to three hours of playing time are given back in return.

If this were a little indie game on Steam costing a couple of quid, then fair enough. But come on now. I have played some demos that aren’t much shorter than Fenimore Filmore’s Revenge. One of selling points of the game states it is a “humoristic western adventure!” but the only thing I found slightly amusing was the quality of some of the voice acting. The joke is on you if you part with your cash to buy this thing.

2/10