Passing down family business from generation to generation has been always a part of our lives. That also happened to our heroine when she was entrusted the curiosities shop from her grandparents who couldn’t take care of it anymore. The shop is a total wreck and its fame and glory have completely perished, and it’s up to our heroine to return the shop back the way it was before, but something is odd. She finds a large tree growing in the middle of the shop, and to her additional surprise she finds out a little fairy village in the base of the tree. She also finds out that her grandparents were taking care of that village, but since they are gone nobody was left to take care of them, and the fairy village has fallen into disrepair, however, and you must help them restore the light of the fireflies to the realm. They are almost out of food, the water has disappeared, and the magic of the village is getting weaker all the time as the inhabitants one by one are leaving the village. The most dreadful thing is there is a strange mist circling the village that contains the wistful spirits. These spirits tell the tales of woe and the normally cheerful villager are falling into despair. To restore the fairy realm there is a series of tasks that needs to be done so the realm can be restored. Starting with discovering a stable food supply for the faeries, and progressing to more complicated interconnected quests, like clearing the store from the dust so you can see better at the real to help the inhabitants better. There are four different magical beings in the game, pixies, gnomes, dryads, and leprechauns. All of them have a certain strength and weakness, so you must combine their strengths to achieve victory in this game. Like said they have different skills like exploration, knowledge, music, and nature. Each of them controls one of these skills. The game is played mostly by your mouse. You can click and drag villagers around to make them interact with things, and if you want to scroll the screen itself you have to grab it and drag in the opposite direction, which may seem awkward at first but is easy to get the hang of. You can also use the mini-map for fast survey of the map, or you can move around with the arrows as navigation keys. There are lots of quest and new challenges in the game for the villagers to finish, but you have to be aware of the wistful spirits. The only way you can get rid of them or at least confuse them for a while is through music. Another possibility is organizing large banquets so you can attract more villagers to the village which have fled away to the forest but with their return the magic grows stronger and the mist weaker. Like most of the games in this genre Little Folk of Feary is also a real-time simulation. This means the game will continue with its story without you playing, or with the PC shutdown. That’s why you have to take care on what tasks you leave behind, and luckily there is a handy slider allows the player to control the game speed, from paused to fast forward, with stages in-between. A bit different from the other simulation games is the villager’s immortality. If you were absent too long the villagers won’t die, on the contrary, they will stop with the task they were doing and harvest food and bring water for themselves. Many will like this new option in the game, while others will certainly dislike it, because it drags with itself that there are no new generations to come. There will be certain scenes where you will get tired of waiting for some tasks to be over, but that’s a part of the game, and you can always go do something else, or the game gives you the opportunity of four different kinds of randomly-appearing collectibles to be on the hunt for, which is a potential time-killing activity. With a couple of flaws in the game, you can certainly put them aside with the beautiful story and marvelous game play in which you can definitely enjoy to make at least a small difference in this type of genre.
