A Valley Without Wind

10/10 I dont know whats going on

weird

The description of the game sounds amazing, and that might fool you.

I wanted to like the game based upon the premise but this oddity of a game is really hard to recommend. I do like the developers and what they intended to create with this game. Having a platformer set in a procedurally generated world with base building mechanics where you fight your nemesis on a strategic overworld map. Now, the game actually manages to combine these elements, unfortunately all the individual parts are rather lackluster and it fails to form a cohesive game. First of all, the art style is horrible. The assets feel all cobbled together and there is no style to it. It is quite ugly and hurts to look at. Furthermore the sound aspect is rather weak, the music is kind of nice but as for the rest. This game looks and plays quite ugly. Very reminiscent of old flash games. Usually, I have a faible for weird art styles but this one is just for the trash bin. Gameplay itself is quite confusing, nothing really makes sense at the start. The world feels alien and obtuse, but for all of the wrong reasons. I kept running around collecting things, not sure if I was progressing or not. The jump and run aspect feels barebones at best. The procedural generation makes every level a boring mess. Overall, I could not really get into it.

I like it. Has a certain melancholy loneliness vibe.

It's a the worst game ever and I love it.

A Valley Without Wind does a lot of things right. Big open world, room for character/town development, a crafting system where ingredients are found in different locations (and are conveyed to you up front). But everything that it does right gets screwed over by a lack of polish. There's a bug where certain maps change where your character is aiming. Permadeath has no meaning because the game goes out of its way to make it meaningless. The game gives you no sense of direction, so it isn't immediately clear what you should or should not be doing in order to progress... and this often causes you to spend very limited resources in the wrong way. You have finite resources that cost nothing (why not just give the player infinite platforms and boxes?), and are required to grind for certain checkpoints that cost ridiculous amounts of money (though the game gives you an option to turn down the number of things you need to grind for... which is just lazy design, balance your own game!). It was fun for a little while, but honestly I feel like I just wasted a handful of hours accomplishing nothing.