Storyline
Fragile is a Mongolian horror game that reveals the story of a 10-year-old girl who was abducted and brought to a place that one could see only in nightmares. She has to overcome her fear and go through horrible things to survive. But how much can a child take? As we know, children’s minds are fragile and ought to be handled with care…
Gameplay
As a child, we have no means to fight and we can barely outrun adults, so we have to use the only advantage – we are tiny and sneaky. Playing Fragile, try your best to not be spotted and help the girl survive by solving puzzles, keeping to the shadows, mastering QTEs, and trying over and over again!
This game is not a light-hearted adventure to collect and save all the kidnapped kids – this is a very immersive, terrifying, and tough experience which will stay in your heart forever.
Positives
1. The story is moving. The whole time you feel for the girl and try your best to help her. It’s not just a character like in most of the other games. You can’t help but care for her as the environment is so immersive and so disgustingly horrifying at the same time. The notes and details reveal more of the story, and the dots are left for the player to connect on their own. Yet, it is important to know that the game has lots of strong, brutal imagery featuring aggression towards animals and children. So, caution is advised if this is a sensitive topic for you!
2. The game poses a challenge. Fragile was designed to be tense and it IS tense, naturally, an infinite amount of tries causes a bit of frustration. Still, the game is beatable and is not too punishing as it is divided into 18 small chapters that make it easy to replay certain moments. I believe that the challenge shows how small the chances actually are for a kid to survive in these circumstances.
3. The visuals are so cool! The whole world is hand-drawn, and the game looks unique! Some players note that Fragile has strong Fran Bow vibes. This can serve as a strong advantage if you are a fan of the mentioned game.
4. Fragile subtly introduces a piece of Mongolian culture to the players by having some traditional Mongolian games to play or Mongolian cartoons being shown on TV. This is undoubtedly a nice touch.
5. There are a couple of endings to see, which is also really nice and makes your choice at the end matter.
Negatives
1. I’ll repeat the warning I’ve already made: the game has some strong visuals featuring violence towards children and animals. That was pretty hard to look at (at least for me, my heart couldn’t take playing the whole game at once), so be prepared!
2. There are a couple of extremely tense moments where some players fail more than 10 times. And when it happens more than 10 times, naturally, the frustration builds up. So be ready that the game might irritate you. But that’s a minor detail as it is 100% beatable!
3. To get to the other ending, you’ll have to replay the whole game from the start. The experience is pretty short, so that’s not a big disadvantage, but is still worth mentioning.
4. It’s hard to figure out what to do during certain moments. In these cases, the game does not provide any hints or help, so you might end up brute-forcing your way out and trial and erroring for twenty minutes until you figure out the solution.
Summary
This game is something special! I rate Fragile 8 Super Brave Girls out of 10! The experience is moving and is dedicated to raising awareness of a serious issue, so feel encouraged to check this unique title out!
Links
Get Fragile on Steam
Related
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