Wildwood Down

Not an easy game, but very funny and clever with great puzzles.

I'm giving this a thumbs up by the narrowest of margins. It's often fun and funny. I enjoyed myself most of the time, though I took to leaning heavily on the in-game hint system when it became clear I wasn't going to exhibit the telepathy necessary to intuit what the developer saw as the solution to one of its often inscrutable point-and-click throwback puzzles. But the pacing of this game brought it THISCLOSE to a thumbs-down rating here. This game has Lord of the Rings syndrome, badly. In that it seems like it's ending three or four times, and then doesn't end. There's a big climactic confrontation moment with the big bad, set up to clearly be the big finale. At that point I was about halfway through the game. What follows is a sudden NEW quest, which culminates in a big contest your character has to win, with a giant buildup and an incredibly tedious scavenger hunt to finally culminate in the big contest! Which is alno nowhere near the end. There's still well over an hour to go at that point. You get trapped in a literal ticking clock gotta-save-the-world climax... which somehow ALSO is not the end of the game. The final boss confrontation is completely unknowable without hints. No carbon-based life form has ever just stumbled into the arcane set of instructions you have to give to the game in order to string together the unlikely skein of events which must occur to finish it. And I was so burned by this pacing issue that, when a character literally says "there's just one more thing we have to do before we go..." at literally the final ten seconds of the game, I was half-convinced I was about to be sent on yet another hourlong fetch quest or scavenger hunt. Instead, mercifully, the credits rolled. So I guess this review stands as a great compliment to what the game does well in its first half, that I'm still narrowly giving it the thumbs-up despite this massive and troublesome set of misgivings.

Great point and click game.