Wind Of Life

I debated for a while on how to review this game. I would not say it's a bad game, though it certainly was not what I was looking for. Ultimately, I believe this game's design has a similar problem of not knowing what it was trying to be. Wind of Life is sold as a "colorful and meditative journey" with tags of "Relaxing" and "Atmospheric". The slow and limited controls, art design, and music all lend themselves to this type of gameplay. The level design, however, are all built as precision platformers, where you must use the wind and avoid spikes and low-poly spinning blades to continue. This disconnect, being given slow and imprecise controls to solve precision platforming levels is the root of why I got frustrated playing this game. Next, the wind mechanic itself, while interesting, serves to introduce more frustration. In a number of levels, you must first jump, then expect the wind to change in a specific way while you are mid-air in order to successfully complete a platforming challenge. The "About This Game" describes my issue with this best: "The game mechanics is based on unpredictable wind. It may have a varying degree of strength and direction. Will you be able to adjust or not?" As far as I can see, adjusting to this mechanic consists of guessing and praying, dying, and repeating. The only saving grace is that the wind seems to be the same after death each time, so you can maybe memorize the pattern and time your jumps accordingly, but precise timing with an unpredictable and uncontrollable mechanic is annoying at best. I write this as Wind of Life has zero reviews today and I hate giving it a negative review as the only reviewer, but I simply can't recommend it to my friends as it exists today. I do look forward to future projects by the developer though to see how they come along.