My father often tells people, “The important thing is to stay calm.” He’ll say this even if we’re already pretty settled in. I think the A Winding Path devs give the same advice.
A winding road is no challenge. It presents an experience. The game is short. It can be completed in 2-3 hours (but prices are set accordingly). It’s also very cold. Don’t die if you can’t solve the puzzle quickly. So stay calm again.
Aesthetics help get there. As you can see from the accompanying screen capture, the world of A Winding Path is minimalist: pencil and paper. The inhabitants of the game are all stick figures, but the birds and cats are not. Structures and trees are neatly woven, but often quite small. This is one of the game’s only drawbacks. While the visual approach seems tailor-made for handheld gameplay, the dense textures and lack of color actually make certain parts obscure on the Switch’s screen.
Audio is also minimal. There is no soundtrack, just ambient sounds such as leaves rustling in the wind and rain falling on the roof. The effect is very soothing (important). Dialogue lines (text only) are accompanied by the sound of pencil scribbling on paper, which is a nice touch.
The game situation is a little more dire than its presentation would make you believe. Rivers and ponds have dried up, raising fears among villagers. People are hungry and unhappy, jobs are hard to come by, and relations in the town are falling apart.
This is your turn. As with all great adventures, Early Acquisition quests provide special powers.
This time it’s a magical lute that summons rain. Fixing the environment isn’t enough, but it can be used to solve puzzles that pave the way to the real root of the problem. Play the lute by randomly wiggling the Joy-Con sticks to create a rain cloud wherever you stand.
My father never said it (but it’s still true), but “rain doesn’t find items for fetch quests.” The majority of A Winding Path’s puzzles focus on finding items that are only available after obtaining the quest. When you walk past an item, you’ll get a button prompt to get it, but if you don’t realize you want the item, you won’t get that prompt. I guess it’s like real life (I tend to make random objects lie until they say they can’t find the object), but it means a lot of backtracking. Also, stick figures only move at a constant speed, so you’ll spend a good portion of the game getting there. Sometimes I remember how to get there.
But given the game’s running time, that might be a good thing. These aren’t required to complete the game, but they do motivate completionists to spend a little more time exploring or digging through a second playthrough.
They also get you a hat!
With so few instructions and hints, it can sometimes be unclear which way to go. keep calm. talk to people Return to areas already visited. None of the puzzles in this one are so skewed that they require a walkthrough or sheer luck to find. When I got stuck early in the game, I realized that I only had to go back to buildings that I couldn’t enter before.
I don’t know if skill games can keep you cool. In one such “puzzle” he must hit a moving target to break the local archery record. That’s 9 out of 10 for him. OK, but they also say that if you get 10 out of 10, you get a special prize.
Even these skill games fit the overall feel of A Winding Path. Keep things simple, talk to people, explore, challenge yourself and have fun. There are problems, but we can solve them if we work together. Is it true in real life anymore? That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case.
But I know it’s important to keep calm.
