A Fork in the Tale (PC) Playthrough
118A playthrough of Any River Entertainment's 1997 FMV game for PCs running Windows 95, A Fork in the Tale.
Played on the hero difficulty setting. I've included the alternate endings at 3:22:23.
After digging through binders of old discs that I've had kicking around for decades, it seems that my interest in 90s FMV games has once again been rekindled. I've been playing a lot of them in my spare time lately, and I find myself surprised at how many I'd forgotten. For every million-seller like Night Trap or The 7th Guest, there were scores that sold poorly in their time and haven't enjoyed any sort of recognition in the years since.
A Fork in the Tale is one such game. It only sold a couple thousand copies, and it's the only game that Any River managed to publish before presumably going bust.
Starring Rob Schneider as the voice of the hero, this "challenging live-action adventure game" spread across five CD-ROMs invites players to "laugh in the face of danger."
As the game starts, you find yourself inadvertently caught up in some bad business. A terrified woman is fleeing from a group of gun-toting thugs, and when you attempt to play the good Samaritan, you're promptly shot in the chest. The next thing you know, you're bobbing like a cork in the sea off the coast of a remote island in the parallel world of Eseveron. A group of sword-wielding soldiers on horseback are closing in when you suddenly spot the woman you tried to save in the distance, beckoning you to follow.
"But hey, how bad can it be? The babes are wearing fur bikinis!"
A Fork in the Take plays out in first-person, and interaction is handled through the icons that drift across the image at key moments. If you click the correct option, the scene will continue. If not, you'll die and be sent back to the last checkpoint. It pays to listen closely to the dialogue, as you'll hear plenty of clues that'll help you through the various scenarios, puzzles, and fight sequences. The interface does a nice job of avoiding the ambiguity that typically comes with FMV control schemes, the pace of the action forces you to stay focused, and the scenes are generally varied enough to keep your interest. (I could've done without the repeated forest chases, though!)
I think the thing that'll make or break the game for most will be the humor. You never see Rob Schneider, but you will hear him. Constantly. The box claims that there are "over 4,000 random lines of hilarious dialogue [to] keep you laughing all the way to the grave." I accept the first half of that claim. As for the hilarity of those lines... well, if someone spouts 4,000 lines of barely coherent gibberish, a handful are bound to stick. A few of the jokes were genuinely funny, but he mostly sticks to a spray-and-pray assault of obvious observations and random word associations. For the sake of my sanity, I quickly learned to tune them out.
A Fork in the Tale is a fun game with a decent story, but it's also a game that tries way too hard to be likable, and it suffers for it. If you like FMV adventures and can stomach hours of Rob Schneider's one-liners, I think it's worth a try. If that combo sounds like poison to you, steer clear.
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