IndieZero: Windosill

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[Oh no! It’s another IndieZero, where we try and make you play decent indie games. Which shouldn’t be difficult, since most of them are playable in your browser, for free. Christ, what more do you want?]

So, here’s the first IndieZero where we talk about a game that’ll actually cost you a bit of money. I know some of you might find it hard to part with a whole three dollars to play a video game, but bear with me.

The game’s called Windosill, and it’s utterly lovely. I picked it up on Steam a few weeks back, since I’m weak enough to be drawn in by anything pretty with a low price-tag. What I didn’t expect was a wonderful and clever puzzle game with insane amounts of care and charm pouring out of every orifice. Yes, every orifice.

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I want to describe it as a point & click adventure, but it’s got more in common with Samorost or the more recent Axel & Pixel than it has with your Lucasarts classics. Rather than giving you agency over a specific character in the world, you sort of are the world through which a character moves. In this case, the character is a little toy truck who just wants to get from one screen to the next. Well, we assume he does – after all, you’re the one dragging the poor guy around, you heartless monster.

The goal of each screen is to find a small cube that slots into a hole above the next door to the right, unlocking the door and allowing you to progress. The first few are stunningly obvious (although the second one took me forever to notice, because I’m an idiot – and I’m kind of glad, because that particular screen has loads of little secrets that most people blow right past), but they get more and more cryptic as you go along, albeit never frustratingly so. No matter how obscure the puzzle might seem at first, if you keep prodding at things and dragging them around you’ll eventually pick up on the occasional visual clue as to what you’re doing right.

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Aesthetically, the game is just perfect. The vector-based art looks brilliant enough in stills, but in motion it’s something else entirely. The animations for each of the objects, and the ways in which they react to the mouse cursor, lend a real sense of weight and physicality to Windosill‘s world  – something that you don’t really get in video games unless they’ve got the Havok logo plastered on the box. The environments also play host to a series of bizarre and weirdly lifelike creatures that, despite your limited interactions with them, are each memorable in their own ways. Even the ones that are clearly halting your progress come across as playful, rather than malicious.

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Not all of the puzzles are great, mind you. The one pictured above, for example, is pretty fun to play with for a while, but in puzzle terms it’s a bit crap. You just keep clicking on stuff until the cube pops out. But when the rest of the game is so bloody clever, I’ll let it off. The sound design is worth a mention, too – even though the game is made entirely with free sounds nicked off the internet, they’re all used to brilliant effect, again adding to the sensation that you’re dealing with real, physical objects.

At the low price of $3, you basically don’t deserve to live if you enjoy the Windosill demo and then somehow fail to pay up for the rest of the game. Granted, it won’t take you forever to finish (you should be worried about your IQ if it takes you more than two hours), but it’s a dense experience that will stick with you once you’re done with it, and the better stuff is definitely in the latter half the game. The ending, while not really meaning anything (that I could figure out, at least), still almost managed to bring a tear to my eye. Mind you, I’m a bit like that.

[Play Windosill]