Like many great adventures, Tux and Fanny begins on a quiet afternoon. Our two oddly named protagonists decide that they would like to play a game of football, but disaster strikes: the ball is flat. Our quest is simple – find a way to reinflate the football. Can we find a pump? This first challenge is the route towards hundreds of other tiny mysteries in the labyrinthine world of Tux and Fanny’s house and surrounding gardens, each stranger and more delightful than the last. There is a tree growing up through the floor. The antenna on the roof is broken. There is a door in the wall where there shouldn’t be and strange figures are coming through. All is absolutely not what it seems.
To categorise this as a point-and-click adventure, or an exploration game, or a puzzle game feels wrong, though it incorporates elements of all three genres while subverting them at every turn. The player wanders around as Tux, Fanny, the cat or the flea that lives on the cat’s back, and even the rewards for your problem-solving have a dreamlike feel to them. Some puzzles contain whole worlds of their own: an entire readable copy of Moby-Dick is hidden on the shelf, as are many tiny comics and zines that are a joy to browse through. There is a plethora of micro-games, found on floppy disks around the house and garden, which you can play on the desktop computer in the living room. These micro-games have silly names such as Skull Legs and Puzzle Tractor, but they are purposeful and even occasionally poetic in their execution.
The visual style is noteworthy – it changes often, depending on which of the many queries we as players are trying to solve. Sometimes it is a simple, blocky pixelated world. Sometimes it is animated in watercolour, sometimes computer-generated, sometimes it is stop-motion, sometimes it is all of those things at once. It is never the same for long.
Tux and Fanny began as a long series of tiny films by director and writer Albert Birney. It feels very personal, which tempers the surrealism and grounds what is a weird experience. The stranger parts of the game are sometimes the most poignant: the narrative journey of the flea on the cat’s back is quite moving, for example, which caught me off guard.
While we might find the pump for the football early enough in the long and surprising afternoon we are playing through, we find many other incredible things. We categorise birds, paint and sell pictures on the internet, float down a river on a tyre and shatter the fabric of reality and paste it back together. Tux and Fanny is unique and gorgeous: a strange treasure.
