Okay, so it turns out Whispering Willows is an adventure game. Whoops. I guess I just saw that there were enemies in the trailer and thought “free game!”, but those enemies are really nothing more than glorified waiting segments (and that “knight puzzle” is a great example of why I don’t like adventure game “puzzles”; even meeting the game halfway, the first knight should’ve had a picture of someone holding an item to better convey the mechanics, then slowly progressed to the lone telescope picture for the final knight instead of vice versa). But hey, I also beat something else:

• Grimm
  

  50 minutes playtime

  no achievements

This is a painting game, kinda like the multiplayer mode in Splatoon. The area around you automatically gets painted as you walk around, and the goal is to cover enough of the arena to fill up a meter at the top of the screen; when the meter reaches certain points, you can ground-pound near certain objects to unlock other parts of the map.

I don’t know if this applies to the rest of the game, but the first episode (which is available for free) is way too easy. There are no NPCs that can hurt or even kill you; the most they can do is clean up after you, but I swear, not only does this not result in your meter going down, you NEED them so that you can repaint areas to get your meter up to where it needs to be. The closest you get to any resistance is when you have to paint target NPCs; all you can do is run at them, and all they do is run away (slower than you can run), so it’s basically just a time-delayed version of what you’ve already been doing (and having to paint the birds is even more annoying since you can’t arc the camera up to see where they are; you have to backtrack to higher ground to see where they are). The only thing that can kill you is lava, and it only shows up in the game’s sparse, incredibly simplistic and bare-bones platforming segments. Falling in just sends you back to the beginning of the platforming segment, so at least the game is decent with checkpoints.

And that’s really all there is to it. EDIT: Well, there are also “secret” coins and a level rating, but they don’t do anything. I know this was basically just a demo, but it didn’t sell me on the rest of the game. It feels more like a game for really young kids than anyone who has played a game before.