#DiscoverIndies: Apocalipsis: Wormwood Edition - One Night in the Woods (NS)

One Night in the Woods (ONitW) is the prequel to the point-and-click game Apocalipsis that came packaged with the Apocalipsis: Wormwood Edition on the Nintendo Switch.  I previously covered the game as part of the #DiscoverIndies at the end of July (was it really that long ago!?)  and figured I would finish the series by playing the short story, relating the events that lead up to Harry at the End of the World (HatEotW).

The format for ONitW is nearly identical to that of HatEotW in that you need to find items in the screen so that you can solve puzzles to progress to the next area.  However, there are a number of differences here compared to the first game, which is a good thing to some extent because a rehash of HatEotW would be a safe and likely uninteresting move.

Hmmmm, where to click?

The first thing that I noticed, was that locating the items was not as straight forward as the first game.  Here, what you could interact with was oftentimes obvious, but not what you needed to use on that object.  Once it became clear that I could not interact with whatever the object was at the far left on the starting screen, I realized that I was able to explore more than what I was initially being shown.  I could scroll the screen to the right another full screen, as well as access an entirely new area.  So now, unlike HatEotW which often had all of the items you needed to solve puzzles in the same room/screen, here you had to move between multiple screens.

At a couple of points, I become a little frustrated because I was unable to figure out what I was supposed to do, but I eventually did click on something that I had passed over as being in the background.  Once I had that mindset, most of the game was a little bit easier to approach.

One puzzle in particular I thought was poorly executed in multiple ways.  First and foremost, there was no obvious indication that I was activating a puzzle.  I simply clicked up a path for Luka to take up a hill that looked like it might open into a cave area.  Secondly, the puzzle itself was not immediately clear.

Hmmmm, where to click.

This was (I believe) the starting screen for the puzzle without either of the two pieces in the puzzle.  I guess you could surmize that you need to redirect the water flowing from the top, but then there are two possible exits leading to the left and down.  The third issue was that with the two blocks that you have to redirect the water, you do not know how they will affect the water until after you place the blocks, and even then the second block can drastically change the affect that the first block had.  The last issue I had with this puzzle relates to my first issue with not knowing that a puzzle existed, is that not knowing why the puzzle needs solving in the first place.  Sure by doing so it allowed Luka to acquire items to further solve the puzzle in the previous screen, but none of that is made clear until after the fact.  Just something that bothered me in an otherwise fun and short story.

That is really what One Night in the Woods boils down to, a short prequel, similar in mechanics but significantly smaller in scope, to put some level of context to Harry's quest, but without making Luka feel like a damsel in distress or that her side of the story does not matter.  Her story is unfortunate in that her punishment (Harry's quest in Harry at the End of the World) is brought about by her good naturedness in wanting to help Harry himself.

You could complete the game in fewer than 10 minutes (which makes its inclusion in the Nintendo Switch Wormwood Edition all the better), but that seems like you would already know all of the puzzles and are flying through without gazing at each scene like it is not a work of art, and what drew me to Apocalipsis in the first place was because the woodcut art style, does involke a work of art (that of Albrecht Dürer and "Danse Macabre").



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Naked in Shame Hung Our Flesh, Oh Lord


P.S.  One last for the road.  And I will say that both Apocalipsis games had some great music oriented puzzles worthy of The Goonies, and I loved that, if only because I do play and can read music.

P.P.S.  You know, I never did figure out what the ankh in the upper left hand corner of the screen was for.  I thought maybe it would fill up, or that there might be something to find, but I didn't see anything.  Might have to do some more looking though.