Welcome to our review of Mable and The Wood, a new Metroidvania where you adapt to the battles by defeating monsters and taking their form.
Mable and The Wood is a Metroidvania where you can take the form of the bosses that you kill, changing how you’re able to explore the interconnected world. It’s also a Metroidvania where you don’t have to kill anyone. The strange cult that resurrected you speak of an ancient prophecy that says you will hunt down the great beasts, take their shape, and use their powers to save this dying world. But what if they’re wrong? The prophecy is old, and words lose their meaning with time…
When the world is falling apart around you, what will you do? In Mable and The Wood, it’s up to you to make that choice. You don’t have to kill anyone, but you might kill everyone. Will you banish the darkness, or will you become it?
The way you move is deadly. Dragging a sword that is too heavy to lift, Mable shape-shifts into a fairy and leaves it where she stood. Recall the sword to your hand once again to slice through any enemies in your path.
You can only maintain your non-human form for a limited time, but killing creatures extends your power. Defeat the great beasts to take their shape and transform into a mole, medusa, spider and more… Find and defeat the other bosses to unlock even more shapes!
The game takes place in a dark fantasy world, with each area making up part of a large, complex map that’s packed full of all kinds of secrets for you to discover. Uncover secrets that you can use to find alternative, non-combat routes through the world and discover a different side to the story (and multiple endings! Discover a rich story and define your own role in it. Will you become the savior everyone’s trying to convince you to be, or will your actions lead to the world literally tearing itself apart?
Mable and The Wood is a game that is small in size but big in approach. It is also not the easiest to get used to, despite the game being so delicately built up to make sure you know all the attacks to move on. At first, you can only fight off enemies, if you want, with your sword. But as soon as you beat that first enemy, the giant spider, you will be able to use the Spiderman-like attacks as well.
Then suddenly, you are able to sling webs and use them to climb up previously unreachable places. This obviously opens up the road to new bits of the map and before you know it, you have several new attack patterns/modes at your disposal. It does take a while to really master them. Despite the obvious high level of care to details, making it a slow learning process to get used to your new powers. Sadly this was not always as easy as I personally found it a little counterintuitive to have this many modes.
I guess it has its charms that the developers made the game this extensive but I was a little unsure if the maps should not have been made even bigger, allowing for more time to really get used to things. Thankfully save points exist and are available all through the map.
I do think the difficulty goes up with the number of modes you free up. At first, you will have a quick adaptation period to the basic sword but as you progress, that level does go up. You do not always get time to just switch modes at your leisure and the timing is part of the game. No pun intended.
Graphically, Mable and The Wood is just a regular Metroidvania and I do think the art style fits the game. I would not change anything in the graphics department either, it just fits.
In conclusion, Mable and The Wood is quite the experience and while it may be a little too hard to get into at times, it does provide the player with quite the bang for their buck. Despite its difficulty at times, I do think the Metroidvania genre is given proper care and is worth the time to truly master this game.
