Mable and the Wood Review

Sometimes my brain does wonder why there's this taste for 8-bit animated games when there's a complete absence of need for it. Mable & The Wood is a lightweight 8-bit style platformer developed by Triplevision Games and published by Graffiti Games. Triplevision are actually based in my home city of Sheffield, so I'm keen to see where they go next after this.

As with all games, what was the unique selling point of M&TW? Awoken by a crowd of chanting bumpkins, you play Mable, who is fated to be the "Bringer of the Dawn", but who's incarnation as a little girl makes lugging a large sword around rather impractical. So, no simple bashy bashy then.

Instead, she can take the form of a fairy (to begin with), and fly for a period of time before reverting to little girl form. While she's airborne, the sword stays in place, and can be recalled, so almost a reverse Just Cause grapple, and if it happens to pass through any enemies, then they take damage. On its own, this is a rather innovative setup, which requires a little bit of thought to get into. You can only fly for short distances before running out of magic, and thus need to manoeuvre yourself and the landscape into certain configurations to get around.

I won't lie, this got a little annoying to begin with, especially when traversing platform-traditional crumbling blocks, and I had a tendency to panic momentarily while I worked out how the fuck to avoid falling to my death. It can get a little tummy rub while patting your head complicated, but I got into the swing of the thing eventually.

Turning into a fairy isn't the be-all and end-all of her abilities. Once larger creatures are killed, she can take their form, which opens up new ball games, new tactics and puzzle solutions.

Graphics wise, the game adopts a traditional sprite style with a fantasy theme. It’s reasonably colourful, but reminds me, for some reason, of the classic Dizzy games from the old Spectrum platform. I'm yet to get "down wiv da kids" on some of these terms, and "metroidvania" still loses me somewhat. However, dropping into a subterranean area with a partial map, potion shop, various one-line locals and a chest bashing loot-style does remind me of other games I've taken a crack at such as Apotheon on Origin and Ori and the Blind Forest to name a couple.

It's a lightweight game, so no recorded dialogue, and one of the only little niggles I had with my OCD approach to some things is that I thought the speech bubbles didn't look quite right.

Throughout the map there are lamps, or altars that you "light" to save your progress and they act as a respawn point in a game with infinite lives.

There's a lack of direction sometimes, which doesn’t help. It does require some exercise of the memory to work out where to go next, or rather which obstacle you may have just gained new powers to overcome or traverse. Switching between "forms" is done with the right stick a la weapon selection wheels on many other games, but using the powers can occasionally be rather hit and miss, or require too fine control than I was able to achieve. While I like the powers, working out which one you need, and swapping between them at short notice is a massive pain, and more frustrating than anything else.

As usual, I find myself wanting to like games which just straight up annoy the shit out of me. There are some nice ideas here but I just got too frustrated after a while trying to get past sections which were just so much trickier than others, and required a lot of swapping of powers, and pulling off what amounted to combos of moves I just couldn’t swing with.

I'm never quite sure these days what the point is of pixel games when there's no need for them. This faux-retro style is slowly getting harder to justify, and harder to enjoy. I can see the business case for it sometimes, with the need to deliver small and lightweight games, but sometimes it feels like for its own sake. I look forward to more games from these devs, but for the moment, I really can't justify scoring this one very highly.