You can poke it with a spear, whittled from a stick and, in a sturdier variation, tipped with bone.
The beast can be felled with arrows, whipped up from freshly hacked wood and fired from a silk-strung bow. wreathing itself in black cloud, it vanishes and reappears, ready to pounce at your back. Take, for instance, the Gloomharrow, a skulking purplish lizard reminiscent of Randall Boggs from Monsters, Inc. It’s there in the steady-burning ebb of your stamina and health, and, in more clear and clawing fashion, in the various predators that roam the isles. These themes, both the grand and the personal-the urge to decode the enigmas of the past while getting back to your people-are pinned down by Kara’s most pressing needs: namely, don’t starve and, if possible, avoid the long dark.ĭeath doesn’t so much loom, in Windbound, as lurk in plain daylight. (Keep an eye out, too, for the early shot of Kara, gripping a guy rope on her raft amidst the tempest, mirroring the rain-lashed hero of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.) Yet the story is of the myth-and-moral variety, rich in symbolism but lightly sprayed, as in Abzû and Journey: scenes of rapture and downfall told in sandy murals, and so forth. In its surf-drizzled premise, and in Kara’s appearance-robed in fur-trimmed cloth and tribal tattoos, with a bun of ice-white hair-there is a hint of the marooned child from Rime. The tale turns on Kara, a young woman at sea who, having been sundered from her clan in a storm, washes up on a beach. But what of Windbound? Who might we imagine gearing up to bask in its breezes? Gentle, hippyish souls with hearts aflutter? Or perhaps those with a nose for adventure, eager to gust into the unknown? I fear both may be swept away. Don’t Starve, This War of Mine, Rust, The Long Dark: what else would they signify but the primal and the pragmatic, the slow wheeze of decay, and the constant threat of doom? Let us picture these players, their high spirits swathed in waterproof canvas, pressing on into the night and greeting the inhospitable with a smile. Players of survival games know what they’re in for.
0 kommentar(er)
