hidden exit

Games like A Valley Without Wind pose a conundrum for me.

It’s a stunning proposal, see: an infinite world, filled with infinite possibilities, challenges and content. It’s the gaming grail, and it’s rather often that an intrepid group of developers set out to raid the tomb that holds it.

Sometimes they come back.

A Valley Without Wind is billed by indie developers Arcen as a procedurally generated take on the metroidvania style with added tingles. Essentially it’s a side-scrolling action strategy role-playing game with elements of building and crafting, set in an infinitely expanding world.

You’d be forgiven for thinking of that heady mix as a lofty goal. You’d be forgiven, because you’d be right. Oh, so horribly right.

 

The setup

But first, the gig: reality has shattered into interlocking “time shards” – nine different kinds of area each trapped in its own time. You’ve got the ice age; you’ve got the clockpunk industrial age; you’ve got the chrome-filled future; you’ve got the picture.

An ill wind’s a-blowin’, an Evil Overlord (no kidding, that’s what his mom calls him at the dinner table) is giving everybody a bad hair day, and robots, dragons and, um, rhinoceroses make venturing outside the confines of protected villages an act worthy of a Darwin award.

Unless you’re you. Your job, as a “glyphbearer”, is to champion the cause of a village. You do this by gathering resources and rescuing citizens-to-be, which you find by exploring, hitting a variety of creatures over the head with a variety of spells, and doing missions.

As you progress you get stronger, and the world gets harder. So far so skippy.

 

The fall

Now let me get something out of the way: I’m no graphics slut. I’ve been playing games since the days of 8-bit, and I still go back to those obese, halcyon pixels every now and then.

That said, by the gods this game is ugly. It’s not just that it appears to have been procedurally cobbled out of chipboard and petroleum jelly –  it’s that none of its constituent art resources fit together. Some parts of it look like the first-draft work of an actual artist, but others look like they’ve been cribbed from the clip-art folder of Windows 95.

And this is a recurring theme (if you’ll excuse the pun).

A major focus in A Valley Without Wind is on combat. Each time shard holds a bestiary, ostensibly suited to it. The ice age holds murderous “skelebots” (sigh) and bouncing bits of tinsel; the desert throngs with bats and glowing balls of light; the ruined towns teem with glowing balls of light and…

So the pattern emerges. Fighting these creatures with your battery of spells is somewhat fun to begin with, but quickly degenerates into firing, jumping and thoughts of suicide. It’s mostly the AI, see.

I’ll use the rhinoceros as an extreme example. While I was minding my own business and looting the odd procedural farm ruin (more on this later), I was regularly obliged to jump over a charging rhino. It wasn’t after me, exactly; it was simply running back and forth between the edges of the screen, just like real rhinos do. In captivity. On Rohypnol.

These rhinos have all the intelligence of a pong paddle. And this is fairly representative of the AI in general: there is no sense of purpose, no glimmer of strategy or boolean reasoning.

Exploring the buildings, meanwhile, depressed me deeply. Especially the larger ones. Consider the average farmhouse. For one, it’s non-euclidian. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem, considering the context. It’s just that it’s devoid of interest and personality, a series of cardboard sets taped together according to the design of Sarah Winchester.