Lost Winds, screens

Nix had some impressions of the game:

Despite it being a downloadable game, LostWind is an attractive platformer that, at least in the short video we were able to check out (which we hope to have available for your viewing in the next few weeks), compared favorably with Wii games like Zak & Wiki. Granted, it won’t make you forget those overly-expensive rival systems, and there are aspects about the game’s graphics that do look to be kept in check to maximize the small download space, but the rich colors and impressive details do present a game we’d love to see more of. What you don’t see in the screenshots is how the wind spirit’s wind interacts — as you gust about, plants in the 3D background flutter in the breeze, and if you buzz Toku, his tunic will catch the air. It’s a game that is in motion with you, the player. Frontier is right now adding particle effects to enhance the visuals, adding details and effects while also testing concepts for how to represent Enril. Lighting and texturing are already looking nice for the style, and the character design is quite cute — Toku and the other folks of Mistralis have that “puffy” look of the Professor Layton games, and the enemies in the game look like a cross between the cartoonish Heartless of Kingdom Hearts and the shadowy fiends of Sony’s ICO (they’re shadowy and formless demons that leak droplets of darkness when you get aggressive with them.) One nice detail about the “2.5D” graphic approach is that you will sometimes see aspects of worlds you’ve previously explored or will soon visit off in the distance — the opening of the mine area in the game’s first screens, for instance, has the town peeking through an opening, also all rendered in 3D.

LostWind is a concept that couldn’t easily be done justice on any other system (the sole exception being the Nintendo DS, of course — in fact, this game has a very “DS” feeling to it), and yet it’s also a small, old-school, play-oriented idea that owes a lot to the timing of WiiWare’s introduction. The work of about 12 dedicated staffers at Frontier Developments over a year’s cycle, it’s the kind of game that could have been overcooked if it had to balloon into a disc-based game, and yet it probably wouldn’t have been as compelling as a portable game since the two-character play fits each of the Wii’s controllers so well. Frontier is aiming to have LostWind be a launch-period title for the WiiWare service (recently announced by Nintendo as starting this May), and we’ll be taking a further look at at LostWind to see how the gameplay measures up to the promise of the video highlights we’ve seen of it in motion.

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