How far are you willing to go to be a good person? Mable and The Wood review
6Mable and the Wood advertises itself as a game that you can complete by bypassing the boss fights and never killing anything. But the game itself doesn’t tell you this. The only way you’d think that maybe you shouldn’t kill any of the myriad of monsters that want you dead is that the people who told you to kill the monsters are a cult as portrayed by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. And you might easily just read that as being the game’s charm. And I would argue that is the point.
(I’ve been told that if you get far enough, it becomes clear your actions have negative consequences for the world, so doing a second, pacifist playthrough makes sense. I’ll discuss this later.)
The secret paths to avoid fighting bosses are just that: secret. They are annoying obtuse to find because there is no signposting one way or another, except for the old woman who complimented me for not fighting a boss I hadn’t even found yet. I frequently found rooms where I couldn’t tell if I was doing something wrong or if it wasn’t actually possible for me to get through the room without an ability I couldn’t acquire on a pacifist run.
And then there’s the finnicky combat. While it works well if you’re trying to kill things, it’s infuriating in a pacifist run because while you’re told if an enemy is in a direct line, you aren’t told if you’ll clip an enemy because the sword is wider than the enemy check. And there are many, many sections where it’s incredible easy to kill something on accident.
Read to full Mable and the Wood review https://indiegamefans.com/mable-and-the-wood-review-bring-the-dawn/