Download Wandering Willows for Windows
Download Wandering Willows for Mac OS X
There’s a lot of pressure on the bigger game studios to deliver a top-notch, challenging, lengthy game experience. Aimed squarely at the hardcore players, these games typically feature 40+ hours of play, multiple difficulty levels, and mechanics so sophisticated they’re the subject of numberless FAQs. However, sometimes it seems that the industry as a whole has forgotten that as a form of entertainment, games should ideally cater to players of every skill level, and therefore craft experiences that satisfy by a number of different criteria. In other words, folks, they don’t all have to be GTA 4.
Enter: Wandering Willows, a game that’s simple to play, easy to enjoy, and fun. While some might scoff at its basic ease, it offers just enough to do to be satisfying. Read on for more!
The story here is that you’re a hot-air balloonist who’s being forced down due to a storm. When you come to, you’re on a strange island with a cute little animal following you around. The critter bears a slight resemblance to something you might find in Viva Piñata, and that’s just fine. Your character never bothers to question why it’s following her around, so neither will you.
You’re in a little town called Wandering Willows, and your hot-air balloon is busted up, so you’ll need to fix it in order to escape. In order to do this, you’ll interact with the island’s populace, fulfilling their missions to gain access to the tools you’ll need to repair your craft. One of the first bits of dialogue you’ll encounter informs you that you’re not the only person to have crashed down on the island, and that, who knows? You might just want to stay after all. Now, depending on your personal outlook, you’ll either find the cute cast of characters reassuringly non-threatening when they keep telling you that, or you’ll start hearing the strains of “Hotel California” the entire time you’re playing Wandering Willows.
Navigation couldn’t be simpler. Click, or click-hold to walk around. Click on people to talk with them. Click on objects to pick them up. Click on the UI to open menus, and click again to choose elements. Click, click, clickclickclickclickclickclickclick cliiiiiiiick. Not since Diablo have you clicked so frequently. But this is not a ding against the game; on the contrary, it’s a strength!
Looking into your character’s various tabs and options — clothing, recipes, and the like — indicates that there may be some depth to the game that casual gameplay might otherwise keep hidden. But let’s dive in and examine how it plays.
The first thing you’re asked to do in the tutorial mode is to plant some wheat for one of the town’s characters, and this process involves nothing more than dragging a seed out of your inventory directly onto a patch of garden dirt and watering it, waiting for a bit, and grabbing the plant that develops. That’s it. You won’t even have to buy the seeds or the watering can; you just kinda have ‘em on you. Completing a task rewards you with the local currency, and Friendship Points, which affect how you interact with the various town members. I’m not sure exactly what this will turn into exactly, but it’s always good to have friends.
Now, for tasks that involve procurement of certain types of items, you’ll use your little critter friend to help you out. For instance, to grab the fruits from the trees, you’ll click on the fruit, but your critter will climb the tree and shake the branch, causing the fruit to drop to the ground. Only then will you be able to pick it up. Similarly, you’ll need to dig up various items, and the critter does the digging for you as well.
Even more intriguing, your critter has an always-on display of its personal stats that represent the current level of its abilities. For instance, there is a bar that represents how high it can climb, and every time you get it to climb a tree, the bar fills up a bit more. When it’s completely full, your critter is able to climb higher. Likewise, the more it digs, the harder the mound it can dig up.
Another ability your pet exhibits is the way it can charm other critters into dropping items you need. To do this, simply click and hold on another critter (there are a bunch of them about), and a bar starts to fill up while little cartoon hearts fly out from the critter’s head. Once the bar is full, the critter leaves an item behind and your pet raises his charm stat. What else can your li’l guy do? I hesitate to even conjecture.
Other tasks you’re called upon to perform include baking pies for others, sewing clothing, growing flowers, fetching items, and probably eventually massaging someone’s feet. Honestly, the mundane and menial nature of the tasks the inhabitants of Wandering Willows ask you to perform makes the whole thing feel like they’re either grooming you for slavery or some kind of pyramid scheme.
But perhaps the greatest strength of Wandering Willows is the fact that it’s a completionist’s dream game. I tend to fail quite seriously at most RTS games because I can’t tear myself away from watching a structure build to actually play the game. I’m all about the pleasure gained from completion. So, being set a simple task, being able to complete it simply, and receiving a nice little ding once the parameters have been met just rubs me the right way. There is a lot of tiny tasks to perform, and I get that jolt to the pleasure center every single time. I don’t claim to understand it, I just enjoy it.
And there you have it. The Wandering Willows demo is available on Big Download for both Mac and PC. Enjoy it for what it is!
Review by Akela Talamasca
URL: news.bigdownload.com/2009/04/06/mac-monday-wandering-willows/
My childhood fantasies always began with being orphaned. Nothing against my parents, you understand — the details of their untimely demise were always airbrushed out of the story as too upsetting to contemplate. But no really good adventures could happen to me while they were around.
As for the gameplay, if you approach it with a goal-oriented, game-winning agenda in mind, you’ll find it is largely busywork. You collect quests, you pick fruits and dig up commodities, you fulfill your quests. If you want to, you can go off-script and bake or sew something you weren’t explicitly asked to bake or sew, but there is no need to do so: you can earn friendship points by giving gifts to the other characters, but you’re likely to end up with their friendship anyway, simply by going through the assigned tasks.
