Woodo is like a cosy colouring book – that’s how three-person indie studio Tiny Monks Tales characterises its game. You have the outline of a colourless scene and need to beautify it by applying colourful items in the right places. This is a good comparison and one that captures the mindful focus and something-do-to-while-doing-something-else-ness of colouring in.
But Woodo isn’t really a colouring book. Its scenes do begin as muted, almost ghostly dioramas, with each object you place painting another little patch of life into them. However, there’s no choice of what colour goes where and no risk of going over the lines. Instead, the pieces are rendered as gorgeous little chunks of wood, painted and varnished, that slot into their predefined homes. There’s something particularly satisfying about watching a grey, indistinct space become a warm, detailed, wooden world one piece at a time.
Woodo is, on the other hand, like a jigsaw. You have a boxful of pieces and need to recreate a scene by finding the right place for each one and fitting them together. This is a good comparison and one that captures the meditative, rote actions of quietly puzzling.
But Woodo isn’t really a jigsaw. Rather than building the picture on the box from scratch, a 3D scene is already there for you to overlay your pieces. You are presented with a UI tray at the right of the screen full of selectable 3D chunks. Some are complete items — a flower, a cup — while some are just parts — an oven door, a window frame — and others, eventually, are not even recognisable shapes, forming just a segment of a character’s head, for example. Finding where each piece goes is less about building a picture than about gradually understanding one.
Woodo is, on the other hand, like a Lego set. You have a boxful of pieces, a schema to follow and a series of 3D creations to build. This is a good comparison and one that captures the guided, creative act of constructing with blocks of fixed shapes and sizes.
But Woodo isn’t a Lego set. Although every piece has a prescribed home, the instructions have been binned. Figuring out a piece’s home is the challenge. You might recognise the shape of something before you understand what it is, or spot an obvious gap but not know what could fill it. The pleasure comes from this deduction and it feels wonderfully tactile to click each little object into place, connecting to the others.
This can be done via the touchscreen when undocked, or with Switch 2’s mouse mode; otherwise, the left stick just moves a cursor. Moving and turning a camera around a 3D scene can introduce a bit of friction, but a combination of the right stick and holding a bumper eventually gets the job done.
Woodo is, on the other hand, like a hidden object game. You have an instruction telling you what to search for, and must find it tucked away, sometimes quite deviously, in an intricate scene. This is a good comparison and one that captures the feeling of learning stories by closer and closer examination of what’s in front of you.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/nintendo-switch-2/woodo-nintendo-switch-2-edition
