Musings from Lythos

Windswept

This isn't how it was supposed to go. Windswept was supposed to be the best of the DKC-likes, the one that brings in a little bit of Celeste and really makes the formula shine. Certainly, no one can accuse it of not understanding the assignment - the game is structured like DKC (DKC2 specifically), gives you two characters with unique and interesting skills (like DKC3), and it takes a lot of stuff directly from the DKC playbook in terms of level design and secrets. The art style is incredibly cute, and while the music isn't exactly up to David Wise's standards, it gets the job done. So what went wrong? How did we end up here, instead of the promised land?

Well, let's talk about what the game brings to the table. Each of the game's five main worlds consist of six levels, a boss, and a Lost World level unlocked by paying an increasing number of bonus coins (more on that later). Each of those levels has a set of C-O-M-E-T letters to collect, along with a cloud that serves as the DK coin equivalent and a couple bonus zones to find along the way - with the game telling you how many there are in any given level, which is greatly appreciated. It also brings in a little bit of Mario with a "did you hit the top of the flagpole?" check, and the occasional secret exit that takes you on an alternate path or to a secret level in the world. The two playable characters play out very similarly to DKC3 with Marbles (the duck) picking Dixie's gliding and horizontal moveset while Checkers (the turtle) mostly picking up Kiddy's tricks; he's got some cool tech like the airdash, but mostly he moves along water and gives you the vertical team throw. So far, so good.

The first big difference that you see is one of level design: Windswept's is simply not very good. Now, some of its faults are inherited from DKC, most prominently the decision to have (almost) every level only have a single checkpoint. This is generally not an issue, but as you get further into the game and levels get both longer and harder, there are definitely some times when you'd really appreciate having a second checkpoint. More specific to Windswept itself is both its enemy design and placement within levels - DKC2 is a game all about flow, and one of the series' signature setups is a long line of enemies that you can roll through and build up a ton of speed in the process. Windswept sort of understands this, and will absolutely let you build up a bunch of speed doing it, only to pull a Sonic 2 and immediate hit you with an enemy or pit that you couldn't have possible seen coming because you are moving at speed. This is compounded by the fact that several enemies seem to be specifically designed to fuck you if you approach them at speed, most notably the snake enemies. They function like the purple Klaptraps of old, jumping when you do, but rolling into them does nothing (it causes you to harmlessly bounce off of them) and their jump tracking is so quick to respond that you have no hope of getting above them in time to avoid them - you WILL jump right into them and take damage if you do anything other than cut your own jump short to get off-sync or come at them from further offscreen, before they have a chance to jump at all.

Beyond its issues with enemy and hazard placement, the game is also just generally not very interesting to play. Most levels fall into the "generic DKC" bucket, with several of their gimmicks being copied wholesale from the original trilogy. The animal buddies get the worst of this, with the dolphin, crab, and bat being almost exactly 1:1 with Enguarde, Squitter, and Squawks, right down to physics and their attack arcs. DKC's bosses were never very good, so you'd think they would at least improve on that much, and yet the bosses are once again one of the worst parts of the experience. I'm particularly fond of the third boss, which genuinely might be the nadir of the entire experience:

Who wanted this? How did anyone involved in this game's production look at this and go "Yeah, people are going to love this." Did no one play test it? Were they just completely ignored? I did my best to collect everything (or at least all the bonus coins) as I went while we were streaming it, and by the time I beat it, both chat and I agreed we were never going to touch that boss fight again. When I did go back and collect the stuff I missed off-camera, it took me longer to get the bonuses from that boss fight than it did to clear one of the Lost World levels we gave up on during the stream.

But hey, let's talk about those Lost World levels for a minute. Following the DKC2 model, each world has an instance of Laamp's Shade, the arcade where you can play minigames, spend your stars on figurines, and unlock one of the game's secret levels in exchange for your hard-earned bonus coins. And these levels are no joke - they are, if not explicitly kaizo levels, then certainly glancing in that general direction. They are universally much harder than the surrounding levels, ask you to use movement tech that the main game rarely (if ever) calls for, and almost always lock you into a state where getting hit instantly kills you rather than letting you continue on without one of the animals. Despite this, they are, across the board, the best levels in the entire game, to the point where I unironically would have enjoyed Windswept a lot more if they had just made an entire game of levels like these. The levels are rarely very long, the platforming is tight, and once you figure out what the tech for that particular level is, the whole thing just flows so nicely. In many ways, they feel like Celeste's B- and C-sides: the game saying "Alright tough guy, let's see if you can handle THIS," and even the worst of them were a joy to play.

But therein lies the rub, doesn't it? Not counting the postgame world (we'll come back to that in a second), for every one of these great levels, there's six more that range from "Fine, I Guess™" to "pretty bad." And the best levels aren't free to enter, you have to scour those mediocre levels to get all their bonus coins in order to unlock them. That leaves us with a game that's not only skewed 80:20 in favor of the standard stuff, but it requires active completion of those 80% in order to even access the other 20% of the levels in the first place. While I hesitate to outright call the game BAD (because it's not), I do feel quite strongly that if all you're here for is the DKC-styled stuff, you'd be better served by playing something like Kaze and the Wild Masks; how you feel about Windswept is likely to come to down to how willing you are to push through the bad stuff to get to the diamonds that are hidden at the back end.

"So, what ABOUT that postgame?" I hear you asking. Well, first you need to beat the game, which means you have to slog your way through the travesty that is the final boss - I don't think it's quite as bad as the moth boss in World 3, but it's pretty fucking close. Once you do that, you unlock a new stage that spawns platforms based on how many cloud medals you have; the game tells you that you need 40 in order to reach the top, but if you're confident with the movement tech, I bet you could do it in 35-ish. Either way, there's 43 available (which includes the one in this level), so it's not that hard to come up with the required total. This brings you to World 6, which alternates between the Laamp's Shade levels from earlier in the game (which still come with their bonus coin costs, so you'll need at least 75 of those as well) and a set of levels that each focus on one of the animal buddies. If you've already cleared the Laamp's Shade levels, then you can skip them here, and the animal buddy levels do admittedly make for a decent "final exam" for each of them. Once you clear all ten of THOSE levels, you get hit with another check, this time for 40 comet medals - and past here is where only fools dare to tread.

World 7 cuts the bullshit and just goes straight for the jugular. Every level uses the "don't get hit" restriction, and at this point the mask is entirely off - we're in full kaizo territory now. Sometimes, that just means that the levels are really precise and demanding, and these are usually the best of the bunch. Sometimes that means it has some kind of big level gimmick, like sticky ceilings or the one that requires you to take a platform up the entire level as you go, while it continually falls back down unless you keep hitting the gear under the platform. And some are just tech showcases, like a screenwrap level that teaches you how to do a shell jump. While the quality of group 2 depends heavily on what the level gimmick is (and 3, to a lesser extent, because some of the movement tech is pretty tough on your hands), they're all generally no worse than "pretty good" with some of the levels being among the best in the entire game - the second level that revolves around bouncing on mice with balloons is by far my favorite.

Should you triumph over all 9 of these levels AND have 99 of the 100 available bonus coins, you'll be granted access to Windswept - the level that serves as this game's Champion's Road. A mammoth of a level, it spans 6 different sections (each with generally 2-3 parts a piece), 8 checkpoints, and requires all the kaizo skills that you've learned and practiced in this world. It took me an hour and 45 minutes to get my first clear, and that was with accidentally taking a warp that skipped the third section - which is also where the sun token is hidden, which means I was barred from playing Windswept EX, a version of the level with harder enemy and saw placements, forcing you to use even more ridiculous movement tech. After looking up that version of the level, I'm gonna say that I'm good; all of these levels in World 7 are brutally difficult, but these two stand head and shoulders above the others.

Which brings me to my final point: who is this game for, really? I wrote about this back when the demo came out last year, and now having played the final product, like 90% of my original concerns stand. The game's marketing heavily leans on the comparison to 90's platformers, with the target audience being people who played and enjoyed games like Mario World, DKC2 and 3, and Sonic. If you're one of these people, then you are mostly going to get what you signed up for - the most stubborn ones here might get through World 6, but I imagine that the average "lapsed fan" demographic washes out somewhere between the completion checks and the first real-deal kaizo level. I mean, look at this. Windswept is not an easy game, even before the postgame levels, but nothing it does can truly prepare you for something like this - you're either willing to grind it out and experiment with the tech until you get it2, or this is the end of the road for you. But on the other hand, if you ARE here for this kind of challenging platforming, then it's buried behind getting something like 95% completion of an entirely unrelated game. Windswept certainly has parallels to a game like Celeste, but Celeste, even at the start, is still a precision platformer - the B and C sides merely ratchet up how precise, how long the sections are, and how much tech they demand from the player. The main game of Windswept is a fairly easygoing DKC clone that has its moments before transforming into Kaizo Mario World; while there isn't zero crossover appeal there, I certainly wouldn't point someone who was interested in the latter at it and be like "yeah just spend 10 hours collecting everything in this other game first" when they could get the experience that they're looking for much more easily in a different game that actually caters to that difficulty.

In a hypothetical Windswept 2, I really think they could knock it out of the park - whether that's by improving their level design of the standard DK stuff so that it's up to par with the kaizo levels, or by just cutting it altogether and actually making that precision platformer that they clearly want to. But as it stands, Windswept is Fine. It is an inoffensive DK clone with a phenomenal postgame, and I wish I didn't have to unironically be like "no seriously it gets better after 10 hours."

(Weatherfall, if you're reading this, give me a World 8 DLC that's just another full kaizo world, please and thank you)

  1. Did I mention that you need to collect a medal at the end of every stage, or else your COMET letters don't actually count? Thankfully the letters themselves stay collected even if you don't get the medal, but that's definitely a decision that this game makes for...some reason. Usually they're right above the goalpost, but there are more than a couple times they're hidden somewhere nearby that requires you to solve a small puzzle at the end of the level.↩

  2. For the record, this is the sequence for the final shell jumps of that level: team throw up with the turtle, ground pound then roll to do an air dash at the peak of the team throw, ready up another team throw to cancel the air dash and jump out of it, switch characters to the duck, throw the turtle into the wall just before the apex of your jump, land on the turtle to get a huge bounce and glide to the next platform - all in the span of about a second and a half? Maybe two at most. And then it do two more times to prove it wasn't a fluke.↩