Winds & Leaves

This is a beautiful, quiet, highly immersive adventure. As another user mentioned it is reminiscent of Journey in some ways - in great ways. But unique too. Any fan of journey will be glad to pick this up if they take the time needed to get used to it. And indeed you must get used to it. I was looking forward to this when it released then saw the initial negative reviews, and being on a very tight budget I was dissuaded on spending the money to buy Winds & Leaves. Fast forward a couple months, to my delight I won a free key from VRGrid. I recommend this even at full price. If this game sounds up your alley it probably is. It's a really wonderful game. (Edit: I've since completed the game. I loved it!). Detailed review follows. ___________________________ First, the elephant in the room. The negative reviews - all based on initial impressions and relating to controls/motion sickness - are understandable. About that: The opening 'tutorial' is built-in to the game world in a way I *theoretically* appreciate. But it's not accessible enough for a game that already has a challenging on-boarding process. If the devs have the funds to rework the tutorial, I would highly recommend checking out the tutorial for the game Déraciné on PSVR. This game has one of the best tutorials of any VR game I've played, and it also does it in a way that's 'in-world'. Devs: pick up Déraciné, learn from this tutorial. A better tutorial has the potential to drastically improve the on-boarding process for the player. The controls of Winds & Leaves are actually quite thoughtful and well done, but it takes time to realize this and acclimatize to your unusual equipment. On-boarding issues: - You have some choice of how to position your tools, but the choice is provided to you before you really understand what you're doing. After my first 1.5 hours I discovered that if I go to the 'calibrate' menu option, I can easily reposition the tools to my liking. It would be better if the game initially places your tools for you, then tells you to go to the calibration menu to change it. - Climbing feels like a mess until you understand how to consistently initiate climbing. For the first hour I kept trying to climb and it felt like half the time it didn't work. This is because I was holding both grips and trying to 'lift up'. Instead I would just move on my stilts. The trick is to initiate with one controller, grip and lift. This initiates climbing. The climbing is unusual but works really well once you get used to it. You can easily maneuver around a tree and it's quite pleasant. - It's only about 45 minutes in or so that you learn you can adjust the height of your stilts to change your movement speed. Too late!! Not only is this knowledge helpful for movement, it's also helpful for grabbing items. Once you get comfy with this you can easily lower yourself to the ground to pick up dropped fruit, or raise yourself high to grab fruit off lower branches. Overall it helps one grab precisely, which can otherwise be a little frustrating. - A tutorial segment that better encourages you to try the different movement settings may be helpful. I'm feeling happy with the roomscale 360 setup, but there's extensive options that allow you to pick from several different rotation methods. The existence of these options are not obvious at first glance, and I suspect that some users don't realize that all these rotation choices exist. Also to the devs: I suggest an additional smooth turning speed of 'very fast'. - I pretty much never ever experience motion sickness in VR, but I experienced a little in my first 30 minutes with this game. After that it went away. (I don't use any comfort options). Again a better tutorial might help the player tolerate this adjustment period and successfully acclimatize without quitting! - On Reverb G2 grip and trigger were flipped, adding confusion. I have created a public binding to fix this for any G2 users, but of course ideally this would be fixed by the devs (to be fair to the devs, I have spoken to many developers who have a miserable time trying to get G2 controls to work properly. So I blame HP and Valve for this issue!) The above on-boarding challenges are magnified because the game already takes a kind of Dark Souls approach to putting you in the world. Not in the sense of mechanical challenge - what I mean is that you learn about the world and how things work by experiencing the world, intuiting things, and trying things out. (For example, learning how your time speed tool works, learning about soil and how to understand the various hint images, etc). That's all great, I like this approach, but because of the messy on-boarding process it's inhibitive in that first hour. IN SHORT, for anyone who's just bought this, prepare yourself mentally for that first hour of getting used to everything and feeling clumsy and frustrated with controls and possibly even a little motion sick. You will get through it, and it's worth it. ___________________________ SO. What about the actual GAME???? Is this a decent game, a good game, a great game...?? Is it worth dealing with the messy first hour? In my opinion this is absolutely a great game, and totally worth dealing with the messy first hour. Immediately when I booted the game I was greeted with beautiful sounds and a gorgeous visual experience Everything is designed fantastically to create one of the most immersive games I've played in VR. (And I've played a lot of heavily atmospheric games). The sound, the visuals, the art design, the spatial design, progression - everything works really really really well. This is a very pleasing, immersive, quiet but engaging adventure. Because of all that, the game world feels like a real world. I don't mean the art style is 'realism', it's not and doesn't need to be. I mean that it feels like you're in a world that lives and breathes and has a real presence to it. It's also really wonderful that you can climb some special tall trees and look up all across the world. Again it just feels like a real place, and being able to do that really enhances that feeling. As of writing this I am 2 hours in and eager to keep going (I gather it's a 7-8 hour adventure from a quick google, which sounds like a great length). ___________________________ Quick note on performance: My system has a laptop 3080 GPU, which is probably a touch worse than a standard 3070 GPU, a bit better than a 2070 GPU. I get full 90fps with the following settings: 1) in-game quality set to Medium 2) vr performance 'mod', https://github.com/fholger/vrperfkit/releases/tag/v0.2.2. Foveated rendering didn't work for me. I used FSR, with renderScale of 0.64, sharpness of 1.0, radius of 1.0, applyMipBias false 3) Steam SuperSampling set to 140% Looks great and plays great. If you don't want to worry about step 2 than just play with the in-game quality and SteamVR SuperSampling to see what works best for you. The game looks great on all 4 quality settings, and there is a noticeable performance improvement on the 'low' setting if you need to use that. ___________________________ This is a very high quality game, beautiful and unique, marred only by its frustrating on-boarding process. In my opinion the control system is thoughtful and well done... if only you take the time to get really comfy with it (about 45-90 minutes depending on the player). I hope that this review breathes some life into this game's sales. There's a large amount of people - people who enjoy games like Journey as the obvious example - that will really love this game and find it to be a breath of fresh air. I would love to see this game reduced to $20 to make it more enticing for people to buy, just because I know it's one of those 'hard sells'. But I do think it is worth the $30 asking price. It is impeccably designed and gorgeous besides that challenging on-boarding process mentioned in every review.

[h1]Experienced on the Oculus Quest 2 & HP Reverb G2 (updated)[/h1] You can view my review & gameplay here: https://youtu.be/T-qX_A5suvg I really did enjoy this game. The visuals & sounds are excellent. It kind of reminds me of playing Journey. Unfortunately, the clunky controls & VR interactions really bring this experience down. It really does take you out of the flow state of regenerating the flora back to life. This game is so beautiful. The art style is really well done. The ambient sounds, sound mix, & musical soundtrack are all excellent. When it works, it's also very relaxing & enjoyable to play. However, a lot of the time I was struggling with the controls or trying to look past the clunky VR interactions. The climbing in this game is one of the worst I have ever experienced in VR. It's very easy to grab the wrong tool or object in this game. Game is running on the Unity Engine. On my RTX 3080, I was getting variable frame rates from 90 to 45 fps on high graphical settings on my HP Reverb G2 (high native resolution, but it looks so stunning the trade off was worth it to me). You have arm swing locomotion and smooth & snap turning options, as well as several comfort options you can turn on or off. You can also lower the graphical settings (but why would you want to do that???!!!!). The placement of your tools was a bit cumbersome as well & you can try to move them, but I could never find a good spot. I did experience 2 crashes during my almost 2 hours of gameplay. The only other issues were clipping through just about everything and not always being able to control how fast you move (even slight movement on arm swing would move you too far when you're trying to get close to some objects). Other than that, like I said, the game overall lacks polish & needs better VR interactions either from using your tools or grabbing objects. Lastly, on WMR, the instructions were usually wrong on what to press for interactions. Still, it's a lovely game. Beautiful visuals & sounds just like Journey. Unfortunately, the gameplay, due to the poor VR interactions bring the experience down (unlike Journey where the gameplay goes with the flow of the game). [b]Rate ?/10. I still enjoyed it. I recommend it to those willing to look past the game's current issues because, yes, it is that beautiful a VR game. However, it's definitely not for everyone.[/b] [quote]Please note: I received a free Steam key through the Steam Curator Connect program. You can join my Steam Curator group here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Oculus_WMR [/quote]

A very unique VR experience that NAILS immersion and atmosphere but definitely will not be for everyone. The game is clearly designed to be as minimalist as possible and not spoonfeed any info to the player, but tries to make them learn through experimentation and environmental context. This can be frustrating gameplay-wise, but the tradeoff is that I found the game to be incredibly immersive and would feel during my play sessions that I was in a different world instead of a video game, which IMO is the greatest compliment you can give a VR game. The core gameplay loop itself of planting trees across the wasteland is honestly pretty tedious, but the game is carried hard by the sense of immersion, atmosphere and exploration. This is one of the very few VR games with a beautiful, well-designed open world to explore and a metroidvania-esque way to progress in the world. Overall, I really loved the game and wish there were more VR games out there like this. The closest comparison I can think of is Paper Beast.

Like many others, anxiety and depression have been a struggle for most of my life. My sibling saw this game on my wishlist and, unbeknownst to me, bought it for me during the autumn sale. My gratitude is immense. At first sight, the visuals alone blew me away and gave me hope for stress ease, and after the initial struggle and confusion with some unclear instructions and direction, the gameplay became immediately healing. You control your own world, you are free to plant, explore, generate life... the world moves without you, but you are the root of the creation. Winds & Leaves allows you to escape your world for a little while and get lost exploring as well as creating a new one -- you heal the world, and the world acts as your lifeline in return. I would highly recommend this to anyone stressed, overworked, or in need of a break or some serenity in their lives.

Controls are so poorly implemented you will quit the game faster then you installed it.

Winds & Leaves is a relaxing game about rebuilding the world with trees. Climb trees to find the seeds to plant other trees. Each kind of land needs a suitable seed. And sometimes 2 kind of seeds need to be combined to plant a special tree to get further to other land. With a special tool you can manipulate time to let the trees grow faster. The climbing in the game could have been better. It feels clumsy. But still this is a good addition to the VR community This is a video with my first gameplay: https://youtu.be/cMIVn5iVyXw

I just finished and loved it. The controls were tricky to get used to at first and switching the play space mode really helped. Once I got the hang of those it became a beautiful, zen puzzle game. It had an unusual but deeply satisfying combination of the primitive—trudging through a desert at risk of death, cultivating an orchard, climbing through trees and encountering ancient art painted on rocks—to the godlike—freely controlling time, flying through the air, inhabiting foliage like a forest spirit and reestablishing what I can only describe as ley lines.

This is a nice, relaxing puzzle game where you have to plant seeds in the ground to progress. It reminds me of Flower on PS3. The controls are a little awkward to get used to, but they're ok. You walk around on stilts with a contraption that holds your tools around you as you move. My gameplay video is below. https://youtu.be/QjGdSMYFgyI

Runs great on Vive Pro 2 with Vive wands. Six hours to complete. Great relaxing adventuring and logic puzzle game design!

我想问一下 ，这开头的界面，怎么点不进去，他不是任意按键，然后点进去的吗，为啥我点不进去