What? Five posts in six days? While this is certainly a record for publishing frequency on the Care and Feeding of Nerds, this may also be something of a peek into the future for this little blog. I'll hopefully be able to share exactly what that means before the year is out but, for now, we can enjoy this review by a new guest author. (Unrelated reminder: you have a little less than 24 hour to enter in our Thrash-Car giveaway!)
The following is the work of my friend Elder Gias. He's currently in the midst of slogging through a backlog in his Steam library and has decided to chronicle the pleasant surprises, misadventures, and occasional WTF-ery of this odyssey. Speaking of the latter, he begins with Woodle Tree Adventures, a 3D platformer by indie developer Fabio Ferrara that was recently featured in the Humble Flash Bundle.
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| Image credit |
First let me tell you the few
good things about this game. It has a
cute art-style that works for an old school platformer. It has cute music that matches the visual
aesthetic. It also lets you zoom out on
the levels more than any other platformer I have ever played.
Now for the rest of the
experience: When you make a 2D
platformer, there is no need to worry about camera angles. When you make a 3D platformer, camera angles
are one of the things you need to worry about the most. The creators of this game seem to have some
Memento style memory loss going on where they constantly forget how to deal
with camera angles. They do show that they
are able to switch angles based on where you move, as there are locations where
when you round a corner the camera moves to let you see the new location you
moved to. This happens a total of one
time in the game. The rest of the time,
the camera will let your character be hidden by anything and everything in the
environment. Additionally, your
character will be hidden by the bag he carries many times.
Normally this and the other camera issues
would not be game breaking except, that since this is a 3D platformer with
edges that let you fall to your death, proper character location is extremely
important. You will find yourself dying
90% of the time due to poor camera movement.
Speaking of the terrible camera,
did the creator have a seizure while coding the camera? In the second level, I died later in the
level and respawned back at the beginning.
However, the camera had rotated 180 degrees such that I was viewing my
character from what had previously been his back. This gave me the unique displeasure of having
to try to control the character while he was completely obfuscated by the landscape of the game.
To add to the thoughtlessness of
the creator, one cannot go back to the level select main menu. You either have to beat a level or exit the
game and restart it. So to get out of
the camera issue described above I had to shut the game down. I wish I had stopped playing at that point,
however I am an addict. I admit, I have
a problem, I am addicted to achievements and being a completionist with my game
library, so I continued playing. The terrible camera means that
many routine platform jumps are almost a total gamble. You don't know how far on the Z axis you are,
so who knows if you will land on the platform?
The best you can do is watch your character's shadow, but that is not
nearly enough.
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| It is a pretty landscape though |
There are a few sections where
you play underwater and you move so excruciatingly slow. Civilizations rose and fell in the time it
took me to complete the underwater sections of this game. When I checked the clock, apparently there
was some temporal anomaly occurring with this game because it took me one hour
to finish despite the Eons it felt.
Another 30 min of game play got me the remaining achievements for the
game. I only had to do some key
rebinding to get the multiplayer achievement rather than subject anyone I have
positive feelings for to a game that is the digital equivalent of a punch to the crotch.
Speaking of key binding, apparently
the Xbox 360 controller is the “optimal” way to play this game. The number of times where the jump button
would not respond to presses implies that keyboard and mouse of the game would
be the equivalent of being a passenger on the Hindenburg’s final flight. Getting beaten in the face with a 2-by-4 is
my preferred method of mutilation when the alternative is getting hit in the
face by a dire-flail. That does not mean
the preferred the method is good, just that the alternative is much MUCH worse.
Though you do have a choice of
control input, there is no choice given in how inept your character is at the
basic action of movement. A normal game
would have your character move when you input movement and have your character
stop when you stop inputting movement.
The creator of this game apparently chose to become the Jackson
Pollock of the gaming world and turn gaming on its head by showing you a new
way to control your character, a much shittier way! You move when you input movement, and you
keep moving when you stop inputting movement.
For a 3D platformer this is a revolutionary idea! No one has tried it to this extent before, we
are truly seeing game development pioneering in how bad development decisions
can be made. When you are already
dealing with a game whose camera is worse than Silent Hill 2 (one of the best
games ever, by the way), with a jump button that works as well as Lou Gehrig’s
muscles, you don’t need your character to move independent of your controls to
show you that the developer hates you and loathes gamers in general. You cannot fine tune your movements and jumps
when you continue to walk several body lengths after you stop inputting
movement. This is most noticeable in
areas where the ledges are only two body widths wide and you land in the direct
center of the ledge. If you don’t
continue jumping you will die again and again because you cannot stop moving.
These continued deaths could have
been mitigated to a degree if the checkpoint system of the game worked in any
sort of appreciable way. I know there are checkpoints because when
you die there are certain places that you teleport back to, however, almost
every time this happens you are then teleported again back to the start of the
level. Only twice in my playing did it
leave me to continue playing from the apparent checkpoint. There is no conceivable way that the game’s
creator beat this game without dying due to the control and camera
implementation done by Helen Keller Industries.
As such, he should have noticed that they were teleported back to a
checkpoint then back from the checkpoint to the start of the level. I am guessing at this point he just threw
his hands up and said “What the hell ever.
Let’s see if someone buys it”.
Thankfully, I only have this game because it was free on Indie Gala at
one point. I am a very frugal person and
love getting games for cheap or even free but getting this game, even free, is
the closest I have ever come to saying it was a mistake to get a free game. There is no reason to buy this game. If you get this game for free, there is no
reason to play it unless you are an obsessive completionist, in which case, I
feel your pain, get ready for an hour and a half of the video game equivalent
of an iron maiden.
This game only has one
play-through. There are no save slots
and the game auto-saves. There is no way
to reset the game to start over for someone else to play the game. However, this not a huge complaint since if
you are allowing someone else to play this game after you have played it then
you are a bad person.
To further question the sanity of
the programmer of this game, some levels have enemies below the entire level
just sitting in inaccessible boxes below the ground. This does not appear to be an aesthetic
design choice, but looks more akin to programming errors that the game creator could not figure out how to fix. It is
as though he put in too many enemies to the level and could not figure out
how to delete the extra enemies and instead just boxed them up in an
inaccessible location. Given how well
everything else was put together, there are no surprises here.
Lastly, it is odd to say this,
but thankfully the creators are really bad at adding your points in your total
tally. This leads to you getting way
more points per level then you should, at least in the unlockable 600 point
level. If it had not been for this
horrible coding of the points, I would have had to play the game even longer to
get all the achievements.
If this game had been developed
as a student’s art or programming project, I would say that they did a great
job. However, there is no legitimate
argument for this game being sold to the masses. The aforementioned issues should have EASILY
been caught by any sort of beta testing by the game creator. On the developer’s website there are a few
quotes about the game from Indie Game websites.
The developers want me to believe that someone said “Woodle Tree is the Hotline Miami of the 3-D platformer.” I
wish that were true, then someone would have shot my character in the face and
ended the torture.
