Woodle Tree Adventures (PC)
If judged purely for its play, Woodle Tree Adventures is an incredibly basic 3D platformer, but when you hear its calm music, see its cute clay art graphical style, and play its simple mellow levels, you’ll begin to see that the game isn’t really aiming to get by on how it plays so much as how it makes you feel. As the Steam store page says, it’s a peaceful experience designed to be a bite-sized title most any age of player can easily pick up. With such a small package though, Woodle Tree Adventures can’t really afford even tiny missteps, and while it’s platforming isn’t meant to be its main appeal, it is how you experience the game ultimately.
In Woodle Tree Adventures, a tiny tree stump character is brought to life by a mustachioed tree to collect Fairy Tears. There really isn’t much more of an explanation of this plot beyond the fact these tears can apparently help revitalize a thirsty world, although the world in the game looks very vibrant already and features many watery areas and areas covered with enough snow that could theoretically be used for such hydration as well. While the Fairy Tears aren’t explained and no fairies are seen, it is possible they might have some magical edge over typical water collection, but it’s clear this plot is just there to explain what you’ll be collecting in the game’s 6 worlds.
The little stump is the eponymous Woodle Tree it seems, and he can’t really do much. At first he is limited to only a jump and a leaf he can smack the game’s very weak enemies to death with, but if he collects enough berries across the worlds, he can get upgraded leaves that shoot out gusts of wind that allow for defeating them from afar. There aren’t really any battles in Woodle Tree Adventures though, many creatures just standing in place innocently and even the more aggressive ones usually just doing small things like charging at a manageable pace or patrolling areas you need to move into. Once you get even the first leaf upgrade they become non-issues due to their basic designs save for the rare projectile user, but the enemies don’t seem like they’re meant to be too much of an obstacle anyway. There are no bosses or high octane moments since that would break away from the intended relaxing pace, the foes a token resistance that the game uses to try and prevent the plain platforming from staling.
The platforming in Woodle Tree Adventures is tolerable at its best and slow or irritating at its worst. Woodle Tree only really has his jump when it comes to navigation tools, a jump that has the unusual feature where he’ll gradually flip himself completely upside down and be hopping on his head if done in rapid succession. If you collect enough berries in a level though this delightful but ridiculous jumping quirk will go away as your backpack becomes too big to allow it. While he does have a run as well, most jumps can be achieved with little issue without a running start and very few ask for anything like timing or having to factor in an outside pressure. There are moving platforms, but they are often slow and above something safe to land on so missing them means all you have to do is wait and try again. These platforms are definitely meant as a means of navigating levels rather than a source of challenge, mainly because the game has little challenging going on in it. It is accessible to a fault, afraid to push in any way since it’s meant to be relaxing and kid-friendly, and while there hasn’t been anything too exciting described here yet, most issues with it have just been things that can feel dull if you like a little resistance in your 3D platformers.
The actual issues that do crop up are minor and some are borderline nitpicks, but with so little going on in the game, they are definitely felt. The biggest issue has to be camera angles. Your perspective on the action is based on the area you most recently entered, certain pieces of land clearly triggering the camera angle shifts. However, this can run into plenty of issues. First is the abrupt ones like entering a little house, the change quick and messing with how you control your movement in relation to the new view. More annoying though are when the triggers mess up. If you end up missing one or backtrack after hitting one, the camera angle stays locked in a way that isn’t designed for the areas you’re exploring, and even worse, if you do die, you are often thrown back to an area incongruent with the current view you have on the action. Navigating when you’re too close up or at an oddly skewed view makes areas that shouldn’t be challenging a little frustrating to navigate, and with death already a bit annoying since it throws you back in levels that aren’t too interesting to explore, the camera problem becomes a real drag.
Smaller issues come up during the berry collection process. Berries are put all around the levels to give you something to do beyond the straightforward task of finding three Fairy Tears per world. Without the berries the levels would be even easier to complete, but the berries are what go towards things like your upgraded leaf, a little headband, and unlocking the underwater world, although collecting enough berries for the extra world or getting the achievements requires repeating the shallow levels over and over. While levels do have themes like being snowy or set on a beach, these are mostly just visual differences that don’t impact the play greatly. Mostly you’ll be facing the same challenges like jumping up high vertical climbs where a drop down to the bottom requires just doing it over again, and unfortunately some berries are placed over jumps where if you don’t grab all the berries on the way down you have to loop around and try again until you do. This is just for the collection sidequest technically, but the levels have little to engage with if the berries are ignored unfortunately. There’s too much focus on uncontested hopping around, and when Woodle Tree Adventures tries to add a new mechanic with some water elevators you can ride up to get between platforms, it flubs these by having them hard to ride properly while also making dropping out of them likely to send you falling to your doom.
Taking less than an hour to complete and still less than two if you go for all the achievements and extra goodies, Woodle Tree Adventures feels its size for sure. However, while the levels don’t offer much, outside of a few flubs like the camera problems and water elevators, they do provide some moments of acceptable inoffensive play. The polymer clay look makes things bright and cheery even if the levels kind of feel like cubes of clay placed around inorganically, and the low pressure environment means that you can play at a relaxed pace. However, the blandness comes through even if you aren’t expecting much from the game, and the little irritations that do crop up unfortunately mean that Woodle Tree Adventures can’t quite hit the mark on providing an easy, calm experience.
THE VERDICT: Woodle Tree Adventures is intended to be a snack between larger games, something that doesn’t push you too much while providing a little play area for you to amuse yourself for an hour or two. The polymer clay look and relaxed music certainly send these signals, but the 3D platforming is not a good fit for this world. Camera problems, uninspired levels, tedium, and weird water elevators mean that the game can either become humdrum or downright grating. The calm simplicity of the world has its moments where it comes through, but every task feels either too plain or negligible, meaning the little flaws end up shining brightest.
And so, I give Woodle Tree Advetures for PC…
A BAD rating. Beyond the camera issues most of Woodle Tree Adventures’s problems are small stumbles or practically intended design features. The levels aren’t meant to put up a fight so they don’t, but they can become unintentionally challenging when the camera doesn’t work right or the design forces boring backtracking. It’s never really hard so you can avoid some moments of it, but the game places berries around so that you’ll have something to focus on besides the straightforward tear gathering, and these can sometimes lead to the troublesome quirks in the game’s design. It really just feels like the game needed more polish, more time in the polymer clay oven if you will, but unfortunately this is the form Woodle Tree’s adventure took, and its small appeals like its cute protagonist can’t make up for a game that is fairly empty.
I had played this game through once before I sat down with it again, and sure enough the things I most remembered were the little problems like the camera, the vertical drops, and the weird upside-down jumping of Woodle Tree. It didn’t have the substance to bother me incredibly either time, but the little bugbears are all it really has. It’s too basic to provide the enjoyable moments that would let you enjoy it despite the rough edges, so unfortunately, this 3D platformer snack isn’t the kind of chill break game it was angling to be.