HomeReviewsFelvidek
Love, blood, and rhetoric
Image credit:Jozef Pavelka
Image credit:Jozef Pavelka
Engaging from start to arguably too-soon finish, Felvidek is a raw, strange, and brilliant RPG that alternates between deadly combat, plummy prose, crass jokes, and odd beauty.
It’s a small map and the game is short, although I don’t think it needed to be any longer. You sprint about on its overworld, explore, talk to folks. Travel doesn’t take long, so I keep going back to the village to hear the woman washing garments in the river talk about the clothes that get dirty forever. About decay. The guitar tones that score this village are alcohol-wipe clean, but every so often a cataclysmic screech of static bursts out from somewhere deep underneath and engulfs them. Everything we think is stable is piled on top of chaos like sandcastles on fault lines. Everything we clean will get dusted in dead skin again soon enough. Every time you return to Jozef, he helpfully reminds you where to go next. Structure. Chaos. Structure.
Image credit:Jozef Pavelka
There is a chaos buried under the villages and castles of Felvidek, and you will have to unearth and stab it later. But your first scrap will likely be the castle armourer, who keeps telling Pavol he stinks like a polecat until you’re forced to beat him into selling you gear. And it’s gear you’ll want, as it’s the only way to get stronger. The game describes itself as a JRPG, so fights against such polecat-prejudiced armourers are turn-based and stuffed with status effects. There are no character levels, but consequently, no force-fed fights or random encounters: violence feels scripted in the theatrical sense, where it’s story beat-downs only.
Fights alsofeeldeadly, even if you’ve got an inventory stuffed with heals and are never more than two scraps and a short sprint away from a full party heal at a church. But why pray to an absent god when you could instead watch Pavol guzzle a bucket of sour cream in first person mid-battle? Why shamefully prostrate yourself in penance, when you could watch a drunk, bleeding knight rapidly spoon porridge into his face so he has enough ability points to mace-pulp a purple-gowned cultist?
It lends the game a terse tone theatrically, baroque in the moment but skimmed of fat as a whole. As does the prose, written with the sort of knowingly modern send-up of plummy medieval flourishes that means every line takes twice as long to read as it looks, but is very much worth the extra effort. Sometimes the writing is witty and crass and crested with pathos, and sometimes it’s just funny because of how convoluted it is. Reading it is like chewing massive mouthfuls of good bread: takes some jawing, but worth it to watch Pavol and Matej discuss the theological nuances of a clergyman visiting a brothel. Some of it might be period accurate, but sometimes it’s a guard who you gave an almost correct password to saying “thou knowest what? Come hither.” It’s a little bit Shakespeare, some Stoppard, Cervantes. And yes, a bit Python.
I gather you can finish Felvidek in about two hours, but it took me about double that. Bizarre and loathsome individuals have coin, if you feel like being a knight while you’re waiting for the tavern to start serving again. A stray conversation with an NPC gathering pears for brandy takes on all the twisting depth and presence of a lysergic parable, and a choice as simple as to whether to steal a sip of that brandy might see Pavol awakening in darkness to a place of mutants, static wails, and deep confusion. The story takes place in phases, locking out some quests and offering new ones at certain moments. Mostly, you’re free to explore, but sometimes you’re locked in for a while, like when Pavol, hardy nutter that he is, is still afraid to go back into his master’s castle in his underwear after having his clothes stolen.
You have two resources in battle: health and tools for special abilities, but only a rare item can replenish tools mid-fight. |Image credit:Jozef Pavelka
