Freddy Farmer (Switch)

There’s an appealing simplicity to early arcade platformers, and it’s not surprising to see many an indie game developer trying to recapture it almost forty years later. Straightforward game designs where you often can’t do much but the opposition in the game world pushes you to become an expert. There is definitely something at the heart of those old games that make them compelling enough to see tributes even all these years later. However, it can be important to understand why you enjoy such games, many pieces of their design not choices meant to make the player enjoy it more but ways to accommodate limited technology at the time or squeeze out more quarters out of the gaming audience. Perhaps misidentifying why classic games are still beloved lead to some of the choices made in designing Freddy Farmer, a retro throwback platformer that makes some odd decisions when it comes to which parts of the old formula to preserve and which to adjust for its form of release.

 

Freddy Farmer is the name of the bearded hero you play as, although he’s not much of a hero to start with. He only leaves his life of running a farm when his daughter is suddenly grabbed by a massive dragon, the farmer seeking the aid of a feline wizard in the woods and learning what he must do to reach the dragon’s lair. A magical barrier blocks Freddy from entering, but if he can brew up a special potion, he can break down the barrier and get in to face off with the terrible beast. However, it is crucial when brewing the smaller potions that comprise it that the ingredients be placed inside the cauldron in a set order, a potion where even one element is off being utterly useless. As a result, Freddy must be careful in the game’s levels, there being five items to collect in each one of them before you then need to reach the cauldron to bank the items and earn that level’s specific potion.

The potion brewing needing to be precise ends up being what guides your actions most strongly in Freddy Farmer. Freddy himself has no special powers and thus no ways of hurting the monsters inhabiting the land. All he can do is jump, and so when you’re in the single-screen levels that all have multiple elevations to contend with, all you can do is try to leap over gaps, enemies, and their attacks to try and get to the ingredients that are somewhat randomly scattered about the stage. Once you’ve grabbed all five, the cauldron in the level starts bubbling, the player beating the level once they reach it and moving on to the next in the world to do it all again but with different dangers to contend with.

 

Unfortunately, once you head to the first level in the forest world, you’ll immediately start noticing some issues. With objects sometimes floating in the air or sitting right in your path, sometimes avoiding them is a challenge in itself. However, it’s not unheard of to accidentally bump an ingredient by jumping a little off or when trying to avoid a danger, and once you’ve mistakenly grabbed an ingredient, that level is a wash. There’s no reason to keep trying to brew the potion, you will have to replay that level, and Freddy Farmer does not make replaying levels easy. If, say, you messed up on the potion in level 5 of a world, you cannot simply replay level 5 since they all must be beaten in order. The good news is that once a potion has been brewed in a stage, you do not need to do it properly again, meaning you can just grab the ingredients however you like and speed up the replaying of that level. However, if you lose all your lives before reaching the end of a world, you do have to start it from the beginning, more repetition in store for you especially as you get to the more difficult areas where it can feel like the main way you learn the threat an enemy presents is dying to them once.

 

Reaching level 2 of the forest though will be the first place where you’re guaranteed to run into one of Freddy Farmer’s biggest problems: waiting. Since there is no way to take out any of the foes in your path, sometimes you come to an area where a large foe is blocking the way and there’s nothing you can do about it. In level 2 we see a mushroom too large to leap over that can spray spores out to the side, but it is walking the only path to specific ladders you need to climb to reach items and the cauldron. The mushroom does not patrol in a simple back and forth manner, it ambles about, sometimes comes to a stop, and sometimes releases those spores, Freddy dying instantly to any hazard he touches so you don’t want to ever be too close to a foe if you can help it. So, you’re standing there, unable to do anything, watching the three minute timer present in every level ticking down, and maybe you finally see your chance to move. You press forward to start running, but Freddy might not immediately respond. See, Freddy Farmer is a nice looking game with some good thematic music for its stages and nice pixel art in its few cutscenes. However, that dedication to make it look nice also leads to the unfortunate touch of having Freddy sometimes have an area-appropriate idle animation. While it is a little cute to see him shivering in the ice levels or quivering in fear in The Cementery (a name that seems more a typo than a potentially good pun), to break out of that little animation causes a hitch in the farmer’s movements, meaning the single second window you might have for specific enemy-avoiding jumps can sometimes be sabotaged by what was meant to be a bit of personality. The good news is you can crouch to prevent these from unfolding, although since ladder animation is a commitment you can’t break out of once activated, you might not want to press down when on top of one and just trying to wait out yet another enemy going on a slow dopey patrol.

The enemy design in Freddy Farmer was almost good too. The mushroom is poorly realized, but there are some foes that involve interesting tricks to overcome them. Bait a snowball thrower into attacking, and he’ll have to hunch over to build another, letting you leap over him now that he’s ducking. Knights in the castle are similarly too tall to clear, but they’ll swing their sword so wildly trying to hit you that they’ll get it stuck, letting you leap over them as they try to free it. The game can even get a bit cute with some ingredients in the mines, one being the shell of a creature that tries to run off, although the fish that leaps out of some water is another waiting game in a game too full of such things. The Cementery has the most egregious level when it comes to awful waits, one stage featuring a central elevator that moves at its own sluggish pace. You start on the bottom floor and two enemies haunt it, a maggot who will roll at high speeds once it spots you and a white zombie. The maggot can be managed with good jump timing, but the white zombie cannot be leapt over at all. Instead, it will sometimes enter a coffin and disappear, later reappearing at some disturbed dirt you can spot early. However, since you’re beholden to the schedule of the elevator, there can be times where its slow movement means you get trapped. The white zombie might be too close to it, meaning you have to run off and spend more time on the ground floor. The ground floor is where you appear when you die in that stage, meaning if you fall to something else there, you can end up in a bad spot where you just watch that zombie slowly shamble over to claim another one of your lives. Sometimes waiting isn’t even the way, like the goblins in the mines who will keep firing arrows at you despite there being little in the way of spaces to walk so it can be tough trying to move and dodge their attacks at the same time.

 

But, with persistence, you can overcome the many cases of badly designed enemies, the annoying waits, and have yourself 25 potions, 5 from each world. You go to face the dragon, and then, Freddy Farmer reveals it wants to waste even more of your time. You must start off playing Freddy Farmer on Normal mode, and while looking at the world map, you’ll probably notice each world has five stages, two Xs, and a green spot marked for the inoffensive but not too exciting Game Boy inspired minigames you can potentially unlock. At the dragon’s lair, you learn that you did not actually make the right potion, because you literally could not. Those Xs are actually stages arbitrarily blocked off from access until you unlock Hard mode, and Hard mode really is just the same game with no alterations save for letting you actually play the 10 levels you couldn’t access before and then face the dragon in a boss battle. This is not a case of the game keeping some secret boss from all but the most dedicated players, the ending for Normal mode even comes right out and says you failed and shows Freddy preparing to run off and actually do it right this time. To actually save the farmer’s daughter, you must now replay the game and remake every potion, make it seven levels deep into each world since continues don’t let you start in the middle of them, and do it all with the same problems present as before but now with more stakes.

 

While there are fairies that sometimes appear in levels to give you an extra life (provided you grab them since they might cross the screen in a place you literally can’t reach due to enemy movements) and crossing score thresholds can give you a life (although all points are lost if you get a game over), Freddy Farmer really wears out its welcome by asking you to do the game all over again but with some extra levels stapled onto the end of each world. You can say the first time through will have trained you to better understand hazards and you won’t have as much learning by death to do, but now there are 35 stages to beat and make sure you grab the ingredients properly in unless you want to do a bunch of them all over again. Maybe you think you’ll chip away at them over time, just put the game in rest mode on your Switch and come back to try for more potions another day. However, should you ever close Freddy Farmer, all your progress in the current run is lost. You can still select unlocked difficulties, but if you exit the game, all your potions are gone. Essentially, you either commit to Freddy Farmer being the only Switch game you play for a while, or you realize perhaps you don’t care too much about saving Freddy’s daughter since it was made a tedious and demanding process.

THE VERDICT: The basics of Freddy Farmer’s ingredient collecting play work in a few levels. Grab the ingredients in the right order, avoid some enemies that can be baited in occasionally interesting ways, and lock in that brewed potion. Sadly, Freddy Farmer is teeming with time-wasting design choices and frustrating obstacles. Enemies who waddle around paths where all you can do is wait and hope to move eventually, the need to replay entire worlds if you slip up even once and touch the wrong item, and of course, worst of all, the unlockable Hard mode, which should have just been the game’s Normal mode since all Normal mode does is keep you from playing the real game. Freddy Farmer works in miniature, but so many design decisions elsewhere make this an arcade throwback that seems to have learned a few lessons from how games have changed since the 80s.

 

And so, I give Freddy Farmer for Nintendo Switch…

A TERRIBLE rating. At the time of writing, I sit atop Freddy Farmer’s global leaderboards, something I did more to show it is not difficulty that made me rate the game so low. It can be beaten, with dogged persistence and a high tolerance for poor design, but even setting aside whether you’re content to have your Switch become a Freddy Farmer machine until you’ve collected all 35 potions on Hard, the fact is the platforming isn’t that satisfying because of choices made on a smaller scale. Freddy Farmer asks you to just stand in place so often as you can’t do things until certain enemies move into place, and yet somehow the design team didn’t notice the farmer hitches when he breaks out of the animations he does for standing in place for too long. They’ll keen on interesting enemy designs like the ones where you need to engage with the foe to get past them, but then they’ll put things like the white zombies in stages where your lack of control over their movement can lead to the kind of death you can ill afford. These problems would be easy to put behind you if you only need to play each stage once, but even ideally you’d need to play them all twice if you want to actually see the ending, and since some enemies won’t reveal what they even do until you’re close enough to die to it, it’s pretty likely you’ll run into annoying problems time and time again no matter how well you play. Hard mode requiring a second run through is likely inspired by Ghosts ‘n Goblins, an arcade game that didn’t let you see its small and underwhelming true ending until you’ve played through the game a second time without leaving the arcade machine or turning off your NES. However, that game didn’t bar levels from you, it essentially a cheap trick where the reward was so paltry you could walk away without missing much. Freddy Farmer doesn’t even let you see its only boss fight unless you’ve beat Normal mode and Hard Mode with all potions, and the choice to not even let you suspend play to come back to it later just feels cruel. Freddy Farmer could be a better game if it was more convenient to go through its stages, if some option to retry a level easily existed if you grab a wrong ingredient, or if it had a more lenient continue system. No penalty for turning the game off feels like a no-brainer too, but there would still be the elevator level, the mushroom blocking paths, and other little bugbears that would require addressing if you want a livelier and enjoyable experience rather than one that just removed the most egregious time-wasting features.

 

I have little doubt that you’ll probably see someone play this game for thirty minutes, give it a positive review because it looks nice, and they’ll walk away unaware of what the game entails if you actually try to make some decent progress in it. You don’t need to go to Freddy Farmer if you’re looking for arcade throwback games though, and the unique angle of grabbing items in the proper order with the mild randomization of their placement is unfortunately buried beneath the reasons not to seek out this game in particular. You can find better retro tributes or even collections of the retro games this game sought to invoke rather easily, and your time will unfortunately be better spent with those than running through a game that doesn’t value your time as a player.