For a game about a fox-like creature exploring a living forest and using song to unite its inhabitants, Fe is weirdly mechanical. There is something lovely about singing gently with animals, as you coax your controller’s right trigger into producing just the right frequency to harmonise with a young bird or deer. But these animal friendships are fundamentally a cog in the game’s machine. It’s plausibly a commentary on the nature of an ecosystem, but the emotional reward doesn’t compensate a player for the amount of busywork.

The overarching motivation for Fe’s adventure is the threatening presence of armoured bipeds called the Silent Ones, though this arbitrary narrative actually provides little real motivation. Your journey is gated by plants that each offer a new way to progress. Big orange flowers produce a draft that lifts Fe into the air so you can reach higher places; green buds produce explosives that Fe can throw at certain barriers. Each plant only responds to one of six languages that Fe can learn from the matriarchal adult version of each of the forest’s creatures.

The process goes like this – coo at the younger animals to befriend them so they will help Fe find a path to the adult; fulfil a task for the adult and learn their language as a reward; and use that language to progress further into the forest. When faced with the Silent Ones, the best approach is usually to hide in tall grass, though sometimes other animals can help to disable them.

A map shows you where to go next, and if you’re not sure how exactly to get there, Fe can summon a baby bird as a guide, though sometimes it stubbornly points you towards a path that you can’t actually take. Repeatedly calling and following this bird also feels mechanical, but, without it, navigation can be confusing. An option to turn off map markers suggests that the developers wanted players to let themselves get lost and explore the forest rather than always forging the quickest path, but the world offers little to recommend a more leisurely approach.

Its visual design – low-poly, oversaturated, with soft-focus backgrounds – doesn’t feel particularly welcoming. It’s dreamlike, but in the sense of a fever dream, spiky and garish. There are collectables – shards that reward you with better moves, such as the ability to glide, and orbs and glyphs that repeatedly hammer home the general eco-friendly message of the story – but the platforming isn’t satisfying enough to motivate you to exhaust its potential.

The idea of communicating with nature through song is a beautiful one, but the execution is inconsistent. It’s fiddly to keep switching between languages, the ugliest sound is used for an ability that you have to deploy irritatingly often, and the beauty of the idea boils down to barking orders at voice-activated plants. Fe has a few standout moments – jumping from tree to tree, or the giant adult deer that is very clearly inspired by Shadow of the Colossus – but neither the world nor the story are compelling enough to hold your interest to the end.