1140: Another Valley Without Wind

I really liked A Valley Without Wind, even though I never came anywhere near to “finishing” it, for want of a better word. (I say that because once you beat the “Overlord” who was supposed to be your antagonist throughout the game, you simply moved on to another randomly-generated continent that was being threatened by another Overlord.) It was a really interesting, if somewhat flawed game that obviously had a lot of love thrown into it. It was a game clearly put together by people who had a vision of what they wanted to achieve and were willing to experiment in order to realise that vision.

For those who are unaware of A Valley Without Wind, I wrote about it a few times approximately three hundred days ago. Here’s one post, here’s another, and here’s a bit of creative writing inspired by the game’s emergent narrative.

I was intrigued and excited to hear that the developer was putting together a sequel to the game, and that said sequel would be provided free to everyone who owned a copy of the first game. (You don’t see that sort of generosity in the triple-A sector, that’s for sure!) Details were relatively scarce to begin with, but it sounded like the intention was to completely overhaul the game and make it a more focused experience. The reason it was being developed as a sequel and not as another one of the many updates that the first game saw is that it involved a fundamental rethinking of the game structure in particular — rather than being potentially endless and rather freeform like the first game, A Valley Without Wind 2 was to have much clearer victory and loss conditions, making for a game which felt much more like it had a “point”.

I spent a little while playing A Valley Without Wind 2 today and I’m intrigued by what I see so far. Here’s the gist: rather than playing the role of a series of adventurers given magical powers by a “glyph” like in the first one, in this game you play a single character who is immortal thanks to a crystal given to them by the big evil demon overlord dude whose dark forces you’ve infiltrated. This means that you can’t technically die — well, you can, but it’s more of an inconvenience than a tragedy, since you can just come back again afterwards.

You’re thrown into command of a ragtag group of survivors on the planet of Environ as they attempt to scavenge resources, build up their defences and eventually take down the big evil demon overlord dude. The game unfolds in two distinctive components — a turn-based strategy game and a 2D side-scrolling platform game. This is a similar structure to the first game, though the overworld map in the first game didn’t involve much strategy and was more a means of simply exploring rather than anything else.

Each turn, you can move any of the survivors in your group to any of the “purified” squares in your domain. If they’re already in a suitable location, they can perform an action such as working a farm to produce food, working a factory to produce scrap metal or building a new structure. Occasionally, monsters emerge from the overlord’s lair on the map and the survivors must deal with them. Eventually, after 15 turns, the overlord comes out to play and starts stomping around the map, and the survivors must avoid his unwanted attentions as much as possible while you build up your power to a strong enough level to take down His Demonicness.

To end a turn, you move yourself into a space next to your currently-controlled area and begin a 2D platform game mission in which the aim is to get from left to right and destroy a generator to “purify” that square and its surroundings. Beating the level ends the turn, causing time to advance. Each level has a different theme according to its terrain type, and many have special buildings and structures to explore. Within the levels, you’ll find various types of enemy and pieces of equipment, many of which have peculiar randomly-generated special effects — how does a pair of boots that makes you run faster but sets you on fire in the process sound?

Your character is highly customizable, and you can tweak your “loadout” each turn if you want — though not once you’re into a mission. Several different classes are available at the outset of the game, each of which has their own set of four spells. Additional classes become available as you explore, and defeating bosses in special “Level Up” towers unlocks new perks that improve your abilities in various ways. You have to find a good balance between expanding your territory so the survivors have space to run away from the overlord when he comes out to play; finding Level Up towers to improve your own abilities; and ensuring your forces have enough resources to survive. As soon as your last survivor dies, you lose the game, so it’s in your interest to keep expanding and recruiting new members to your forces.

I really like what I’ve seen so far. It’s much more “focused”, though this has come at the expense of the wonderfully complex randomly-generated levels of the original game. One thing I really liked about the first A Valley Without Wind was the sheer amount of stuff there was to do. You could wander into pretty much every building and explore it to try and find cool stuff. You’d never get anywhere if you did that, of course, but the fact it was possible was really cool. By contrast, A Valley Without Wind 2’s levels are much shorter and more linear, and traipses through buildings are linear shortcuts between two parts of the level rather than sprawling, mysterious structures to explore. On the whole, it’s a change for the better — as I say, though, it does make me miss some of the first game’s idiosyncrasies.

One thing I’m not sure how I feel about is the change to the soundtrack. The original game featured a rather wonderful score that had more than a touch of chiptune about it, giving the retro-style gameplay an even greater sense of retro flair. The new game features a number of recognisable themes from the first game, but a much more “realistic” sound to its score. It’s good — but is it as charming as the bleepy chiptunes from the original? I’m not sure. One thing I will say, though; the title screen music is absolutely gobsmacking and well worth just sitting and listening to for a bit.

I’ll be checking this game out a bit more in the coming days, and I’ll be intrigued to see if it can hold my attention. I liked the first game a lot, but the fact I never really felt like I was getting anywhere put me off playing a long way into it. This new version appears to have fixed that particular problem with a much more focused experience, so I’m keen to see how it plays out. Knowing my general abilities in the strategic department, I am anticipating a complete loss at the hands of the overlord within 20 turns, but we’ll just have to wait and see about that, won’t we?

#oneaday Day 838: Still No Wind Here

As promised, here are a few further thoughts on A Valley Without Wind, given that I’ve inadvertently spent most of today playing it.

First up, having read a few reviews around the Web which focused heavily on the visual side of things, I direct you to this post. Get over it. Not everyone has the budget to make something that looks like Final Fantasy XIII, and it’s not as if AVWW’s visuals are bad per se, they just look like something out of a PC game from the 1990s, shortly after we discovered Super VGA. If “8-bit” can be an acceptable aesthetic (and I shan’t get into a rant on the misuse of that term here) then why not “mid-90s PC game” if the graphics don’t actually hurt the experience?

Secondly, the music. You will, as the cliche goes, love it or hate it. Here’s a simple test. Do you like chiptunes and electronica? You will like the music. If you do not like chiptunes and electronica, you will probably want to switch it off and listen to something else. (I love chiptunes and electronica.)

Those two glaringly obvious points which most reviews seem to focus on aside, let’s discuss the gameplay a little more.

Following an initial tutorial which introduces key gameplay concepts to the player with various gravestones sarcastically describing how various predecessors could have avoided their fate, the player reaches a settlement. This is a sorry affair to begin with, with only a single, bedraggled-looking survivor staggering around it, but a selection of basic buildings already constructed and ready to go. Three of the giant crystalline “Ilari” life-forms are here, and later in the game they’ll provide a means to purchase items, build things and cast far-reaching spells. To begin with, their most important function is to restore your hit points.

Leave the settlement and you’ll be taken onto a grid-based randomly generated world map. Each tile has a particular terrain type which controls the type of enemies that will spawn there, the items you’ll discover and, if you’re lucky, the survivors you might come across. Each region comes from a specific time period — the game’s story centres around the concept of the world being “shattered” both geographically and temporally — and this comes into play with some of the missions later.

When exploring a region, you’ll come across buildings. You can enter every single one of them. Most of them are sprawling mini-Metroidvania adventures in their own right, but for the most part you’ll be seeking out the “stash” rooms that contain plenty of treasure. These are conveniently marked on the graph-like abstract dungeon map in the corner of the screen, which shows the connections between rooms but not their exact layout. A key part of gameplay is “scouting” buildings, which means delving in just far enough to reveal the rest of the map — rooms that are within two “connections” of the one you’re in appear without you having to go to them — and then weighing up whether it’s worth exploring further.

The buildings are rather abstractly designed (not to mention having TARDIS-like properties), and call to mind retro classics such as Jet Set Willy, where a “real world environment” was simply a room with obstacles in it and various graphics representing toilets and televisions scattered around the place. They’re far from “believable” environments, but it doesn’t matter — you’re playing a side-on platform game, so there’s a limit to how realistically these structures can be designed anyhow. I’d rather have something that is interesting to explore than something where every building is the same.

Missions play a key role in progression. You’ll come across missions either on the world map or tucked away inside buildings. These whisk the player off to a unique, special area and challenge them with a specific task. Sometimes you might be climbing a linear tower and bashing bosses on the way up. Another time you might be defending storage silos from incoming meteors like a Missile Command platformer. Another time you might be tasked with removing the “anachronisms” from an area, which involves figuring out which monsters don’t “belong” in the region you’re in and eliminating them. Destroying all the correct monsters concludes the mission. Destroying an incorrect monster spawns two more, either, both or neither of which may also be an anachronism. Yet another time you might be challenged with getting through a “one shot, one kill” dungeon where either you or the enemy grazing their knee results in instant death.

As you progress through the game, death becomes an increasingly frequent occurrence. When a character dies, they’re gone for good, leaving behind a tough-to-defeat vengeful ghost at the location where they shuffled off the mortal coil. Fortunately, you don’t lose all the stuff you’ve spent hours accumulating — you simply lose any upgrades you might have applied to that character’s health, attack power and mana pool and have to pick a new playable character. As you rescue survivors from different time periods, you gain access to a range of characters with varying abilities — those from an “ice age” era, for example, are resistant to the cold, while those who are not will require special equipment to explore cold environments effectively.

The eventual goal is to storm into the local Overlord’s lair and kick him squarely in the balls. Said Overlord has a bunch of lieutenants, too, who can either be knocked off individually before taking on the Overlord or battled at the same time as the big boss man. You can theoretically walk straight into the Overlord’s lair from the beginning of the game, but you’ll be ill-equipped to deal with the challenges therein. Instead, it’s advisable to complete a bunch of missions to raise the continent’s “civilisation level” (thus affecting both the strength of the enemies and the potential rewards on offer) while also collecting the raw materials required to buff up your character’s spells. And rescue survivors. And build buildings. And construct wind shelters to push back the wind storms that buffet the region, making exploration difficult. And track down “mystery rooms” to find clues describing exactly what the hell happened to the world to get it in this state. And… you get the idea. There is a shitload of things to do, and completing the first continent then invites you to do it all again in a more diverse array of environments.

The sheer amount of things that there are to do can make the game seem like a daunting prospect. The game often draws comparisons to other open-world freeform adventures such as Minecraft and Terraria and that feeling of being alone in a vast, terrifying world is very much present and correct here. Focus on completing a few simple tasks, though — the game is good enough to suggest some to you — and things will gradually start to fall into place.

A Valley Without Wind is an ambitious title that tries very hard and while it’s true there are elements of the experience that could do with a little refinement, it’s a very memorable, compelling and addictive game that produces some excellent emergent narrative. Best of all, though, is the fact that the developers are still working on it, meaning the game experience will grow, change and evolve as time goes on. If it’s this intriguing now, I can’t wait to see what the game looks like in a few months or years.

#oneaday Day 837: No Wind Here

My fine friend Alex picked me up a copy of the unusual A Valley Without Wind for my birthday — thank you, good sir! — and I had a brief foray into its strange world this evening. Obviously I haven’t spent that much time playing yet, but it’s certainly been enough for me to determine it’s a game I look forward to exploring further.

AVWW is a procedurally-generated Metroidish platformer with spellcasting, building, collecting and resource management. The concept sees the player taking the role of one of several random (and disposable) characters and exploring a vast 2D world in an effort to take down “The Overlord”.

In order to accomplish this, the player must explore the overworld, find their way into abandoned buildings that are remnants of the “old world” to recover supplies, delve into caves to find gems and other resources, and ultimately build up a settlement and their own power.

As you progress through the game, you acquire new “spell gems” which allow you to cast various magics. You can also upgrade your abilities with various materials and take on missions to provide a sense of “structure”, but otherwise the game is very open and free, and the developers claim that it’s both impossible and impractical to explore every nook and cranny of the randomly-generated world.

The game takes place on a series of 2D maps, with different “rooms” (actually scrolling regions) connected to one another by doorways and cave entrances. Exploring these rooms and the way they’re connected to each other is a key part of the experience. A helpful minimap system helps you figure out where to aim for, where resources are located and where strong boss enemies can be found.

Interesting things come about when the player dies. The game features permadeath of sorts, but the game isn’t over when a character bites it. Instead, the world lives on but the player starts a new character. There’s even the chance to come across the ghost of your old character.

Then there’s a multiplayer option, which I haven’t investigated as yet, but the prospect is intriguing in a Minecraft sort of way — a procedurally generated world with multiple players running around finding resources and killing enemies? Sounds awesome.

There’s an element of the “roguelike” genre about the game, and as regular readers will know, I’m a big fan of that sort of thing. The fact the game has a convincing sense of structure while still being put together almost completely at random is an impressive achievement, and I look forward to seeing if the game manages to maintain a sense of pace and direction throughout. It’s obviously designed to be replayed, too, as there are a wide array of difficulty settings for both the combat and the platforming sections separately.

Further thoughts to follow when I’ve spent a bit more time with the game! (And you can expect more on Nier shortly, too — though this may well be in the form of a Squadron of Shame SquadCast.)