LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias

The space is still lost from the middle of the title.

Not too long ago, I was moaning about how both Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 were both included on this list, despite being far too similar to each other, and the latter clearly putting on the better show. It's not the first time I've grumbled at such a thing, and thanks you LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias, it won't be the last.

Remember the first LostWinds, a downloadable Wii title that had you control gusts of winds to help out a little kid on whatever journey he was on? Well, if you wanted more of the same, but a bit smarter, you've come to the right place.

For everyone else - myself included - you need to look for something else to entertain yourselves with.

Fun Times

Once again, I'm playing the PC port of LostWinds 2, with its take-it-or-leave-it graphical settings, and in stark contrast to the snowy, kid-focused start screen, we actually begin this game as a weird plant creature name Riveren.

This guy - whoever he is - doesn't do gusts of wind, but he does sing, and singing operates the machinery of his village, like the lifts and the giant... ball... statue... thing. No idea.

Making a return to ruin everyone's fun are the blob things, who love to stick to your face but hate music? Or do they just disappear if I mouse over them in a threatening manner? I don't actually know how I got rid of them from the garden, but I did, then I fell through the floor and discovered a doohickey, just like the start of the first game.

Frustrations

I hope you played through the first game because I think a little prior knowledge of its events may be useful for the next part. Forget Riveren, we don't care about him anymore. You're still Toku, the mute little boy in a colourful 2.5D village full of wind.

Still floating over your shoulder is Enril, the mouse cursor/fairy/wind that manipulates the surroundings to help you out on your quest, and this time it's a mighty important one as your mother has gone missing in the mountains.

How do we get up there quickly? Cue the giant Golem!

Platforming in LostWinds 2 is the same as the first game, with Toku able to run and climb the smallest of ledges, but little else. The wind will need to pick up if he's to have any chance, so it's a good job you still control it, swiping your cursor or Wiimote up in a desperate attempt to waft him to where he needs to go.

I'm sure it's easier if you take your time and make clear movements, but more often than not I was scrambling to give the little git any height at all before letting him plummet to the floor for the next attempt. It's quite clear what gaps you can and cannot reach with a gust or two, and the game is designed for you to eventually come back to the places you've not been able to reach with new skills to help you make some progress, Metroidvania style.

We're literally thrown into the final leg of our trek up the mountain where we experience something new to the series: the cold. Not only do we have to stick close to fire so that we don't freeze, but we also get to form snowballs out of the air and fling them into icicles to break open new paths towards the last known location of our mother.

Do snowballs actually do that? No idea. It was a pretty big snowball, though.

We meet a guy called Smith (and by meet, I mean there's only one house we can walk into and we're prompted to walk into it, so we do) who has seen our mother recently - helped her out, in fact - and can point us in the right direction by marking it on our map. I continue to not make any use of that map.

The reason is that the path forward is generally quite obvious. If it's blocked by something burnable, and there's a fire nearby to blow with a gust of wind, the path is quite clear. If it's blocked by something that you can't hurl something into, you probably don't need to open it yet.

It's not long before we find the crash site of the vehicle our mother used to get this far, and because it's a crash site, it probably isn't looking too good for her. Monsters lurk nearby, monsters that she's written about in her journal, the pages scattered to the wind but conveniently collectable on our travels.

But these aren't the blobs of before, nor the fiery blobs here. These are yeti-like monsters, but they're in conflict with a ghostly thingymabob who knocks us off this walkway to some sort of mountain city and sends us hurtling down into the darkness below. Where the yeti monsters live.

Luckily, it's all been one big misunderstanding, as these monsters are just people in Yeti-fur suits, and they've even been looking after our mother, cursed though she appears to have been by that ghostly thingymabob - I'm well aware these descriptions aren't useful to you.

We've got a quest, then. Saving our mother by finding this no-doubt evil thingymabob and doing the thing to reverse the curse. Piece of cake. Oh, and now we've got a fancy new fur suit to help us survive the winter.

Did I even mention that earlier? Yes, I did. The whole 'stick close to fire to not freeze' thing. Well, that mechanic is gone now, hope you enjoyed the tension it brought. LostWinds 2 is clearly a little game for littler people, harsh survival mechanics would put them off, so away they go.

Blobs are invading nearby, and the only way to deal with them is to burn their spawning pools with the power of the wind. Nobody else helps you, of course, so you just blow around the level until there aren't any more enemies left, then the door to be on your merry way is unlocked and that's you on your quest.

Nobody to accompany you, you're left to your own devices. It's onto the next navigation puzzle.

I get frustrated with the controls that I still haven't got the knack of and don't bother completing it. I'm not interested in LostWinds 2. I'm out of here.

Final Word

I said that I might have played more of LostWinds had I cared about the characters or the story. Well, I still haven't played any of LostWinds because I still don't care about the characters or the story, and a glimpse of LostWinds 2 hasn't changed my mind.

This is fundamentally the same game, but in the snow, only it's not. The big twist this time out is that you use all of your wind powers from the first game combined with the ability to change the seasons. Frozen things melt, wet things freeze. What else happens? It rains? UK weather isn't a good teacher of how the seasons change.

LostWinds was limited in scope because of download size limits. LostWinds 2 proves you can actually squeeze more into those limits than you might have imagined. So why play both? The story? Don't tell me I need to know the story.

It's bad enough that even splashed across Ultrawide monitor the text boxes can't even fit all of the paragraphs at once, but now I've got to pay attention to what's written in them? And all with no voices, or even Henry Hatsworth/Banjo Kazooie grunting to give the impression of speech? Bah, humbug.

LostWinds and its sequel might be small games that do something so few other games do, but with controls and mechanics that annoy more than they inspire, I have to fall back on a story to see me stick with something, and the one I see here - in both games - isn't doing it.

Give them a go, by all means. See how much Wiimote waggling you do until you give up, or maybe it's just me not having gotten something yet, I don't know. But I do know that I don't need to see both titles on this 1001 list.

Fun Facts

I've just learned/spoiled who the golem dude is. Maybe you do need to play both of these.

LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias, developed by Frontier Developments, first released in 2009.

Version played: PC, 2016.