Welcome to our review of Woven, a game where you play as a woollen elephant.
Explore a woollen world with two unlikely heroes and discover why the world is being threatened by metal insects. Welcome to a world where woollen creatures once lived in peace. Stuffy is a well-meaning but rather clumsy stuffed animal that wanders the world alone.
Glitch is a metal firefly that has lost its memory and identity. Was Stuffy left behind? Where did all these machines suddenly come from? And what does Glitch have to do with any of this? Join them on their journey through a world of wool, fabric and hidden dangers.
The world of Woven is filled with obstacles and challenges. You will have to find blueprints of animals to modify Stuffy’s shape and abilities. Elephant legs may be strong, but rabbit legs can jump. For every situation, there is something that fits. Keep an eye out for hidden paths while you explore the world. Find secrets that reveal the forgotten history of the world.
Your Stuffy, your style. Customize Stuffy, with different body parts and fabrics. Over a hundred different hidden fabrics to discover. Mix and match, a selection of different animal blueprints each with their own skillset. Experience a fully handcrafted world. Multiple worlds, each with their own unique ambiance, soundtrack, and story.
An epic adventure told through rhyme. And much more.
Woven is a special type of game, it is slow in nature and you will feel like nothing can happen to you at first. Slowly explore everything and solve some basic puzzles. You even get to ride a massive pumpkin down a river. Each little world you explore has its own atmosphere and before you know it, you are moving on to the next.
Woven is rather slow-paced as the E for Everybody rating kind of gives away. At 20 bucks, however, I find it slightly overpriced as I will try to explain in detail. The game looks very blurry in handheld mode in my switch, while the subtitles on screen look perfectly crisp. The story itself unfolds the entire time and the weird way to explain game mechanics by showing what to press in the game, is not always clear.
I struggled with the basic controls at first because it was unclear from where I stood that I had to press a second button to make my little elephant buddy roar. I was too close to the in-game information and it just did not show the shoulder button had to be pressed as well. After several attempts, it finally made sense to take a look at the information from a bit more distance and then I finally got to see what I needed to do.
This was not the only time I had trouble connecting to the game. Like when you hit one of those gigantic sewing machines, the ones that let you change your acquired powers. I thought I had changed into my strong arms and legs, but apparently I had unequipped them instead. This had me backtrack a fair bit on a few times.
While Woven is not a bad game, it did suffer a little from these issues and while I had very little fun trying to figure out everything, I can not really say I would give it a much higher score if it were having a more crisp design. The entire game is somewhat suffering in my humble opinion from the gameplay mechanics and how they are presented and they did negatively influence my gameplay.
In conclusion, Woven is an exploring game where you get a ton of free decisions as to where to go, you can follow the path of the game or head off on your own. Sadly it suffers from too many issues to really be a great match for most of us.
