It’s either a holiday bounding across lush vistas or a white-knuckled, vertigo-inducing parkour utopia. Windlands isn’t terribly inventive, however, its considerable accessibility options and presence inside virtual reality’s honeymoon do well to suppress effective objections.
My first ten minutes with Windlands were an escalating series of revelations. After a brief tutorial I was deposited into a lush green world and told I could only latch my grappling hook onto green bushes or trees. This jungle-like space was full of bushes, eliminating the need to be judicious with my selection or timing. The grappling hook, with its higher-than-it-should-be elasticity was suited for either Spiderman’ing across elevated landscapes or attaching itself to bushes and meekly reeling me in. At this point Windlands was operating on the Bionic Commando model, further proving the thesis that grappling hooks and videogames are a combination as potent as chicken and waffles.
Next, by accident, came the discovery that I actually had two grappling hooks. Holy shit. L2 and R2 each deployed their own hooks. I had been getting by just firing one out there and hoping for the best, but two provided a genuine facsimile of Spiderman. Furthermore, blasting both out toward the same space and heaving myself up seemed to create an additional level of thrust. Windlands physics engine places a premium on creating and carrying momentum, suggesting two hands hooks are better than one.
At this point Windlands was really starting to take off, but I was still bothered by the apparent lack of camera control. The right analog stick, traditionally assigned to camera control like every first or third-person game from this millennium, didn’t want to go above a certain latitude. This was annoying, as most of the bushes I wanted to grappling were directly above me. So I looked up and oh right this is in VR; my point-of-view was also the targeting reticule for the grappling hooks. I could look up and latch anywhere within my hooks’ reach. Fantastic.
This is the extent of Windlands mechanics. There are neither upgrades nor attachments. There is nothing to navigate beyond the intense set of physics that powers you up and over incredibly high and faraway distances. This is disappointing if you’re used to investing earned points to level up an avatar, but rewarding if you’re more into leveling up your skill set as a player. This could also be a cop out, maybe I’m overlooking Windlands’ shallow skies because of its novelty, but the economy behind its mechanics is enough to fulfill the goals it presents to the player.
Windlands is organized into three different worlds; jungle, city, and sky. Each have a relative theme that should be obvious by their name, but all are constructed with strategic allotment of grapple-friendly bushes, cascading rock or tower surfaces, and other bizarre remnants from a past civilization. Inside each level, usually at the highest points, are three (two in sky) crystals. These are required to obtain before passage to the next level, but there are also dozens of optional tablets to collect. Tablets are in every nook and cranny imaginable, further rewarding experimental jumps to out-of-the-way places.
Difficulty helps determine the nature of a relationship with Windlands. On easy you can grapple onto anything, conceivably removing much of the challenge from the game. This isn’t necessarily a negative. In VR, especially, Windlands could double as an insane grappling hook exhibition for a casual crowd. Normal (which I completed Windlands on) reduces grapple surfaces to green bushes. Hard, apparently, arranges Windlands to make better use of the game’s latent parkour mechanics.
Character momentum was an aspect of Windlands I could never fully reconcile. There is no physical presence to your existence, just a circular crowd that’s used to telegraph your presumed landing position. Moving forward creates an unnatural sense of momentum and acceleration, and this is carried over to landing any jump. Upon touchdown you’ll always lurch forward a few steps. I assume this is the way Windlands had to work in order to balance its physics engine, but, in my head, it felt better to pretend that I was Donkey Kong and unable to stop on a dime. There was no other rational explanation for Windlands making character movement feel like a fun size freight train.
Once you’re familiar with its operation, Windlands’ chaotic level assembly begins its transition to procedure and structure. Checkpoints, giant beige ruins exuding blue lasers, provide a safe point of return for any of the thousand times you accidentally leap to your doom. Likewise, looking around the level quickly reveals the location of each crystal. If there’s a giant blue/white light shooting into the sky, there’s a safe bet it’s over there. Honestly I gave up on the tablets after the first level, however, this was only because I found extraneous objectives more worthy of my time.
Each level’s aesthetic is extended toward two distinct bonus levels. One places ten yellow orbs all over the place and challenges the player to collect them as quickly as possible. The other transitions Windlands into a more traditional “level,” with a start and finish point across a linear path. Both are timed and feature leaderboards. Each one also seems geared toward refining a particular skill inside Windlands. City’s jumping challenge removes bushes entirely, forcing the player to rely on the unwieldy parkour mechanics to make progress.
The final challenge of the game, the sky area’s jumping challenge, was one of the hardest things I have done in a videogame. My sheepish go-to strategy for much of Windlands was to grapple onto a bush, hoist myself up, and safely jump to the next surface. This area demanded a momentum-enforced Spiderman accent through multiple consecutive bushes with a side helping of parkour. If that failed I would climb a bush, leap off backward, and grapple on at the last possible second to create momentum and effectively creating a forceful swing point off of nothing. I never would have thought to do this in the main portion of Windlands, and I only figured it out through repeated experimentation and constantly wondering; how in the hell do I get over there?
I loved the sheer desperation that came with unplanned feats of improvisation. Three bushes deep in a series of jumps, there’s a realization that you’re not going to be making the fourth jump. Instantly turning around in real life, seeing the bush you just left, and conditioning a response to look back and grapple onto it is basically a survival skill. If anything I wish Windlands had more insane levels like this, rather than stuffing all of its more challenging sequences into the last third of the game.
Having reviewed ten other virtual reality games in the last two weeks may have softened the format’s impact, but Windlands’ presentation is forceful and impressive. Skating to the edge of a rock in the middle of the sky produces intended sensations of vertigo, an impression that barely weakens after hours of play. There’s also a lot of motion inside Windlands, and, while I am not sensitive to many of the aspects of VR that make people sick, Windlands does feature plenty of accessibility options. Turning can be cut to 90-degree shifts, and a cage, either translucent or solid, can be placed around the player. This should help ease the tension (or nausea) some experience in VR.
With that in mind, I was glad Windlands felt closer to a designed game than a demonstration of technology. It’s still a very 1.0 experience, grappling around with a simple set of objectives is a project one can only rationalize inside of a launch space, but it’s a game and not an escalating series of tricks or sterile, canned sequences. You turn fast, you move quickly, and the simple act of looking around is low on Windlands’ list of priorities. Later on Windlands will be seen as a launching point for something great, but right now it’s a confident expression of its hardware’s intensity.
