It would have been a wonderful visual novel. The game would have been ideal in a different medium – one that removed the corpse Woodsalt left behind. Where Woodsalt fails then, is not recognizing that you cannot remove the gameplay from a JRPG and leave its desiccating husk and expect it to be dandy. Ultimately, when you take something like a JRPG and remove everything but the story, what you have done is stripped the game of its gameplay. Which is honestly a testament to how interesting of a game Woodsalt is because that tedium was spawned by a desire to progress the plot. The beginning and the runup to the end are great, but the middle was simply tedious. The game is rather short, although it does sport multiple endings, so I was shocked to find that the story couldn’t maintain a consistent level of interest. When I was not hauling my arse around Nu-Terra I was consciously aware of the game’s pacing – which is all over the place. I did my little circuit each day, hoping what’s-his-face and whoever-that-lass-is had generated a new piece of character development for me to engage with, and it dragged.ĭragged being an incredibly accurate word that can be applied to multiple facets of the game’s execution. Because there is nothing but walking and talking – and only half of that is interesting – it felt like I was just going through the motions and hoping that whatever direction I picked resulted in a story segment. This is probably one of the weirdest things I have ever written, but in Woodsalt, walking is a barrier to progression. There is nothing here but walking to the next story event – mainline or not. NPC’s never have anything interesting to say, every location is a shell with nothing to interact with. The problem is, outside of the optional nattering, everything is pointless. There are NPC’s to chat to, various locations to mosey around, and plenty of optional events/conversations to partake in. Nu-Terra is a small-ish town you can explore. For all of its narrative strengths, Woodsalt starts to fall apart once you start to engage in the actual game. That is, of course, until you factor in the gameplay. Your decisions also have quite the impact, and what you say to people can have catastrophic ramifications.
Splice in a healthy dose of murder, mystery, politics, and things start getting spicy. Things start getting freaky from the get-go, and it is not long before you are introduced to a cast of interesting and varied characters. You are awoken from stasis on the cusp of returning to OG-Earth, and things start taking a turn for the worse. Your ship landed on a planet dubbed Nu-Terra, and life has continued in relative peace. What was left hopped aboard Noah’s Ark-esque spaceships and scattered amongst the cosmos. Surprisingly it wasn’t the fault of us, but instead a race of malevolent monstrosities who were hellbent on our destruction. Ībout a millennia ago, Earth as we know it went to pot. Let’s face it, that decade was a groundbreaking sequence of consecutive solar cycles that spawned everything from Final Fantasy VII, to Persona. I am a 90’s kid after all, and anything that panders to my aging sense of nostalgia is fine by me. A psychological adventure game in the style of a 90’s JRPG? Sign me up. When I first heard of Woodsalt, I was immediately hooked.
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