Wingless Fairies
A downloadable game for Windows and macOS
Wingless Fairies is a first-person stage play about becoming someone new again.
YOU ARE: Fawn-Mar Evangeline, a Great Fairy in training. It's your first day shadowing at your friend Velvet's gay bar / dressing room hybrid. Your role is simple on paper, but being a mentor to all who walk through the door will take more vulnerability than you know. Enter Rain.
If it wasn't clear, this is a coming out story. Except you aren't the one coming out, that was years ago. It's Rain's turn now, and she needs someone older and wiser to guide her through it. Can you really fill that role? Maybe you can act like it.
"GAMEPLAY": An experimental format that's somewhere between a visual novel and immersive theater. Characters move and talk at their own pace around you, and you are part of the 35 minute scene. Your words are chosen for you—roleplay with your gaze and inner thoughts instead.
Features full motion capture and simulated voices.
PLAYTIME: 35 minutes
PRICE: Free (no optional donation, support me elsewhere if you want to)
CONTROLS: Mouse + keyboard or xbox controller, can be played mouse-only
PLATFORMS: Windows, Mac OS X
ACCESSIBILITY: Fully subtitled, OpenDyslexic font is available
WHAT'S WITH THE ZELDA ASSETS: Go play the game. Then you can read my reflection here (spoilers).
Download
Install instructions
For Mac users - right click the game and select Open to run the game.
Comments
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This was a really exceptional experience. You did a great job with the writing and acting, and the manual touch to the timing of the vocal synths had a great effect. The intimacy and embodiment was really achieved here, and I think that categorizing it as an evolution of the play as an artform is a good way of conceptualizing it. I was engaged and interested throughout the whole experience and I'm glad you were able to share this.
This was really good, as was the writeup. The fountain theme kicking in when it cuts to the fountain was perfect
really incredible, thanks for making this
Thank you flan!
really love the way you used and modified the assets here! the environment and characters feel like they fit really well together but the taken-out-of-context-edness and the conflict between the realistic animations vs the lack of visual detail & facial movement are striking elements that sell the magical realism vibe. i also appreciate the restraint in terms of what we actually see happen in the game for ~the first half, which makes the scene changes later on (dimming the lights, the flashback sequence, moving to the fountain) all the more effective. rly like the metaphor of the fairy fountain that is also not really something with a real-life equivalent.
i enjoyed reading your thoughts about pastiche, it illuminated some thoughts i had about games like oikospiel and titanic ii that i couldn't really put into words before.
another thought i had while writing this: watching these specific characters moving about in a very atypical of video games slowness reminded me of playing majora's mask and seeing the npcs go about their routine waiting for them to get to the objective you need them at (especially when using the inverted song of time). it's both a bit of excruciating impatience and of fascination. a great feeling to recreate :)
Thanks for the nice comment. That's a great point about the feeling of watching the npcs in majoras mask. For me it reminds me of half life 2 cutscenes and the way I would always start messing around during them. I agree there's a special feeling there if you can get past the video gamey impulse to move as fast as possible. Encouraging that patience (and the openness that comes with it) was important to me here.
nice story