Little Folk of Faery

Fantasy game art from Little Folk of Faery.

Discover a small village of fairy creatures and embark on a fascinating adventure where you will help the inhabitants to restore their world. What is behind the mysterious, omnipresent mist? What secret lies behind the wistful spirits who are now roaming the place? With the help of fairy, solve these mysteries though numerous quests and restore your shop's splendor of old in Little Folk of Faery.

Little Folk of Faery is a Virtual Villagers type game set in a miniature fairyland that is itself part of a curiosities store. The fantasy artwork and quests/tasks therefore involve an interesting mix of fairytale elements and "artifacts" that are recognizable as human-made objects. Little Folk of Faery is a relaxing game that can be played either actively or passively.

In active play, you grab-and-drop each fairy to set them about various tasks, and can zoom out into map mode to look for white sparkles that tell you when and where a "collectible" has appeared so that you can direct a fairy to retrieve it. When fairies are scared off by the wistful spirits that haunt various places, you have to reassign them to the task they were performing so that they can resume it until it reaches 100% completion.

In passive play, you set the game to pause (there are 5 speed settings, with the lowest one pausing the game) and, like active play, assign fairies to tasks. You can then exit the game and come back at a later time (possibly hours later) whereupon the game calculates what has happened in between. If there were wistful spirits near a fairy, your fairies can still be affected and are calculated to flee and recover their morale by talking with friend and eating. However, unlike in active play, they won't then hang around doing nothing--instead the game automatically sends them back to the original task until it is complete. There's less micro-management in passive play, but also no chance of searching for collectibles (fairies do not automatically pick them up).