If Knight Lore’s realisation of an isometric 3D world represented a major shift, and Alien 8 was its makers Ultimate getting in their own response ahead of the crowd, what of that crowd? We’ll see at least one game that built precisely on Ultimate’s setup, but they also kick-started an interest in isometric 3D more widely. Others used that possibility slightly differently.
Fairlight is a game set in a castle in a magic kingdom, because of course it is, and it similarly takes place in a set of monochrome 3D rooms, but it doesn’t look or feel much like Knight Lore. Rather than precision platform jumping and a set of linked one-room challenges, it provides a more open and interdependent adventure. Rather than playing out as a larger-than-life cartoon, it has aspirations to a little more realism. And following through as a result of both is that it is a 3D game in a different sense. In its opening rooms you can climb some stairs to progress to higher levels in a tower, and already its map expands further into its three dimensions than that of Knight Lore.
Fairlight’s castle is its biggest strength. It’s not the most varied place ever, but it features some bold design decisions that pay off. There is a series of rooms with striking black and white chequerboard floors, and emerging from that section into another room to see the chequerboard pattern still visible through the doorway made me smile. It looks great and shows an attention to detail that can’t be taken for granted even now. On the other hand, realism doesn’t always work in favour of comprehension. I took the cyan room at the beginning as being a corridor right up until I watched someone else playing Fairlight on YouTube and saw them walk through one screen edge to another segment of a larger location. That was never a problem with Knight Lore and its stylised blank archways between rooms.
That sense of the freedom to do more playing off against focus extends through most elements of Fairlight. You have the freedom to push around and pick up many different objects, to jump and to fight, but making any of that much more compelling than just walking around proves a struggle. Walking around proves a struggle, for that matter, feeling like you’re shuffling through treacle any time anything else on the screen is animated. Progressing tends to mean avoiding enemies, picking up anything you can, and moving it to somewhere you can pile it up. Creating stacks of barrels and plants to reach new things, like grabbing the crown on top of an archway, is an achievement, both for the player and for Farlight’s Swedish programmer Bo Jangeborg. It’s just not a very magical one.
