A nice, casual exploration game. It does suffer a bit from the inability to control the camera due to not having any mouse controls, just forward, back, turn, and jump.

Make sure you remember where you found certain plants because they are not marked unlike what the pillars unlock. ...Especially sumac the first few times.

I do like that despite how simple the puzzles for newly unlocked essences are, they don't tell you what the solution is. You kinda just fumble around interacting with them until you realize what it wants you to do with some. Kind of like early puzzles in The Witness if you've played that.

The fox moves rather fast at first, especially once you unlock the speed booster. But with the sheer scale of the map, going back and forth for the magic essences you need can feel pretty slow, especially with how the fast travel flytraps don't ever seem to send you where you want to go. They do always drop you right before another flytrap so it's more just zigzagging.

Breaking all the totems and finishing the game shouldn't take over an hour or so, but going for the 100% mushrooms for the true ending is gonna be a lot slower. Thankfully there's both an indicator of how many are left in each area, and circles scattering the map that show a line where some nearby mushrooms are, so it's still very easy. Just again, feeling slow despite how fast you can move.

I give it a 7/10. Lovely 3D sequel to it's namesake flash games. Just not for anyone wanting something beyond pure exploration.

Still organising my thoughts, but the long story short is: I'm putting this game in my favourites list. I found it hard to put down the controller for the entire game. It delivers on exactly the premise and vibe you expect of it, and does the best thing possible, by underselling, and over-delivering.

This game, in a nutshell, is like the environments of Breath Of The Wild, but you're an increasingly more agile fox, sprinting (and more... the last unlockable ability (which I wont spoil) really brings a whole new beautiful experience to traversal of the world - one of those things that'll make you gasp a little the first time you use it. And they make it completely unlimited to use, which is perfect for this game, more on that in a sec.) around these beautiful landscapes. It's amazing to me that one person made this - Lucas Paakh I raise my emoji hands in praise of you.

The central hook of this game is the flow state you find yourself in, running around these truly gorgeous natural landscapes, with great atmosphere and music. It's a game I'm glad to own just for the simple purpose of knowing it's a world I can go into whenever, zoom around in fox form, as the lush vistas whip past me or beneath me. Probably a perfect game for a rainy day, but I played it on a fine day and it was great. I found this game surprisingly hard to put down for the entirety of its (for me) 5 hour run-time. 5 hours bearing in mind that it's endlessly revisit-able for that flow state and beautiful world, I left about 200 mushrooms uncollected, plenty satisfied with the experience I'd had. It's a pretty perfect transition into 3D for this beloved old flash series that has stuck in my mind for some 20 years preceding me buying this new addition. The original left an unwavering signature of enchantment in my young mind - and this game positively delivers on that.

I have some things that marginally weighed the experience down, that I'll just mention here as more or less objective issues (maybe they'll get patched, perhaps, but if not, a really lovely experience remains here), but these are reasonably speaking, part and parcel of a game made by one person and should definitely not discourage you from getting this game if you're interested. it's absolutely worth the full price in my opinion!

The game knows its central charm is running around a lush world as an agile, lightweight fox, and it sticks to it, and it makes it a great experience as a result. Not much gets in the way of it, in that sense, it just lets you run free, BOTW esque - but I do wish the game taught the player a little better at the start. In this game, you essentially have a 4-slot inventory, and you'll collect blue essences of different plants and animals. Breaking these stone pillars requires three particular blue essences and will unlock your movement upgrades, and also unlock other animals, so as to ensure some degree of sequencing through the game - it's definitely not a strictly linear experience in this sense though, which feeds into that freedom. I will say, they could have been laid out better to tighten up traversal in the late game (I think this game designed its world before its sequencing, if that makes sense), and some of the starting blue essences that are naturally occurring in the world were actually kind of rare. You'll be staring at a ton of sunflowers or something, but only one of them has the blue essence. It's not hard to see, the one you're looking for is blue, but it's the frequency at which these, the ferns, etc. occur in the world, while you're witnessing non-blue-essence versions of these same plants by the dozens, that makes it a little sub-optimal. You just wish you could get the blue essence from any of that plant, or at least, more of them. Having said that, it encourages exploration, and that's a lot of what this game thrives on, finding what's over mountain tops, in caves, underwater etc. As animals get more involved, some really cool little puzzles get involved with how to attain their blue essence - most of these are good, but a couple could have been clearer. I'm not sure what gets the birds to hand over their blue essence, I just chased them around til something happened. This is the occasional downside of a game that doesn't overly explain itself with text boxes. I'm glad they're not in the game at every turn, it's not in the spirit of this kind of game (which it sticks to commendably well), but some of these little animal puzzles could have been a bit clearer, or something. One thing I wish I saw more of though, was the feel you get when chasing the stag around the mountainous range. That chase, flowing around those high altitude hills, valleys on either side, wrapping around, it really zeroed into that flow-state feeling that the game thrives on in an interesting way. Preceding this there was no need for race-like attention to your steering. Not that this section is a race section, you can do it at any pace (this game is very chill/cosy like that), but I wish there were more 'chase' sections like this! It's not a problem though, just a little thing that I felt had a lot of potential. As it stands the game pretty much entirely fulfils its potential, though, so don't concern yourself with this paragraph too much.

I think that's all I have to say. This game is definitely worth the money in my experience, a real achievement by a solo developer, and a lush flow-state experience to be had running around a beautiful world. If you ever wanted to be a fox, but with slightly fantastical capabilities, like you're in a dream... this is the exact game for you. Environmentally speaking: It's pretty much Breath Of The Wild: Fox Edition, basically. What's not to love? Try it out! :)

This game is absolutely stunning: the landscape, the effects, kept surprising me all the time. If you love foxes and magical creatures, and wandering freely around the map then try this game out! Playing it just felt like a really good and mystical dream, definitely recommend it.

this is for us autistics out there

This is wonderful cozy adventure game. I love it and I would totally recommend it.

A fun game and definitely a worthy successor to the Classics, but there were some confusing changes to game mechanics that needed explanation and familiarity with the other games actually made it worse:

1. The fact that some Blue Essences are only unlocked after certain stone pillars are broken was not explained. Nothing in the other games works like this, and I wasted hours searching for Essences that weren't unlocked yet.

2. That the floating glowy sparks are spores that mark mushroom locations. In the other games there's only one kind of glowy spark thing, and they're fairyflies. I kept trying to figure out how to catch them to take them to the hungry plants and got frustrated because I couldn't. The fact that the spores look almost exactly like the fairyflies from the first two games doesn't help.

The lack of any explanation of these changes introduced something of an early learning curve, but once you get past that, it was a lot of fun. Super bouncy fox is great. :)

Conditions for inclusion:

• -The player character must be consistently a fox; the fox must not be merely a skin or a character option
  
  
• -Must have 100% working Steam achievements
  
  
• -Must not be a visual novel

Game #26: William and Sly
(aka: William and Sly 3)

The developer of an influential Flash game series comes back over 12 years later with an ambitious new installment -- bigger, longer, and full open-world 3D! And it's... actually pretty okay!

William and Sly is a series about a fox who runs magical errands for his wizard friend, and along the way tries to eat all the mushrooms in the world. The games have a wonderful "zen" feel to them, welcoming you to run around a moody and tranquil forest wherever your heart desires as you listen to some nice chill background tracks. All of that is true of this game; it somewhat succeeded in capturing the essence of the original games, although that's a tough comparison to make between a half-hour 2D platformer and a 10-hour 3D platformer.

In this game, your primary goal is to collect over 450 mushrooms scattered around the land (because of course, that's always Sly's top priority). But there are also some cursed obelisks scattered around the land that you need to dispel. Dispelling an obelisk requires three specific "blue essences" of specific plants or animals scattered around the world. Locations of essences start out unmarked on the map, some become marked once they're unlocked, and others you'll just have to keep your eyes open for. You'll be doing a lot of backtracking, but it's no big deal when you can run as fast as Sly does, and you'll be finding more mushrooms with every trip.

Things I liked:

• -I loved the sublime mood of the game. The design of the open world combined with the new music tracks just absolutely nails it. It's stirring, but melancholy at the same time. I loved just getting lost in this world for hours at a time.
  
  
• -I loved the sense of freedom. You can scamper up most cliffs and steep slopes if you're persistent.
  
  
• -I really like how fast the fox runs. I'm too used to fox walking simulators where your maximum speed is at about a third of this. Sly can absolutely dash across the landscape with little effort, and it feels like the whole world belongs to you. You even get an upgrade that lets you run even faster, and it suddenly feels like you're playing Sonic Frontiers.
  
  
• -I loved the effect of the red mushroom spores visible in the air from far away. Really makes you feel like Sly is tracking their scent on the wind.
  
  
• -When you're down to those last few collectibles in the game, there are some features to help you find them more easily, which is much appreciated.

Things I didn't like:

• -Tank controls. You can only run forward and backward, and you turn Sly by rotating the camera. I feel like the developer gave up trying to make complex animations for veering and turning, which is usually what gives foxes most of their personality in games like this. You're stuck staring at Sly's tail for 90% of the game. It also makes running downhill an awkward pain.
  
  
• -Whenever the game requires any sort of precise platforming, it's absolutely awful. Tank controls make it feel like you're platforming with a racecar. Running backward makes Sly run behind the camera and become invisible until you stop moving. Sly has no ground-shadow to line up your jump. There are no coyote frames, so trying to jump in midair will just eat your input -- so you can't accurately jump while you're running downhill or over bumpy terrain, since your feet will never be completely touching the ground. Thankfully, the game requires very little in the way of precise platforming -- you're mostly just racing across gorgeous terrain in a straight line -- and that's good, because if it did, it would be some of the most frustrating platforming I've ever experienced.
  
  
• -This game brings back the worst element from William and Sly 1: underground caves. It is not fun to hunt for small holes in the ground just to get the last few mushrooms in the game, and there are no elegant design elements to lead you toward them. Even the aforementioned late-game convenience features don't exactly help. If you're observant, you might notice that cave entrances are surrounded by round boulders, but that's the only hint you're getting. The last 70 or so mushrooms are going to be super frustrating without a guide (and probably even with a guide) so be prepared. Oh, and you actually need to find all the mushrooms to properly finish the game, which is an unfortunate first for this series.
  
  
• -The game doesn't seem to be well-optimized. I've heard a lot of complaints that you need a powerful computer to run it consistently. I have a fantastic graphics card, but the game kept overheating my CPU too.
  
  
• -There's a late-game powerup that's too overpowered. You may feel like a dunce for having done everything the hard way up until that point -- but using the power on the remaining challenges feels like you're cheating. There's no even medium where you feel like you're doing things the right way. Using the power also separates you from the sublime atmosphere of running across the landscape, which I found to be the game's biggest strength. In my opinion, the power should've had a stamina bar and a long cooldown between uses, so that it would still feel special every time you use it.

This game could use a lot of polish, but I really found myself looking forward to playing every time. It stumbles a little at the starting line and the finish line, but it's a wonderful 10-hour relax-a-thon otherwise.

5.5 / 10!

I think I'm a fan of the series now, and I'd love to see a William and Sly 4.

A neat little scavenger hunt game that has you racing across the painterly landscape to collect objects, some of which are obtained by little mini-games. Not quite my cup of tea but I enjoyed the author's flash games when I was in middle/high school and kept up with it now and then.

controls are a bit wonky, gameplay a little repetetive and the map is a bit too big, but it's still fun. it's not that similar to the old flash game verisons of the flash series, but still gave me a nice nostalgic feeling :)

Does a really good job translating the feel of the flash games to 3d. Aside from pretty much abandoning any sense of a platformer in favor of going all in on just exploration and discovery. I'm not sure it'd do well with anyone other than those here for the nostalgia of the old flash games tho. There's a lot of fox games out there with more substance.

That said, I enjoyed it for the most part.

The controls feel really clunky tho. Only being able to move forward and back, while left and right just rotate the camera, feels extremely off and makes any sort of fine control nearly impossible. I found myself making 8-point turns in circles around mushrooms trying to collect them when it would have been smooth and easy if I was allowed to just move sideways. It feels good when you're racing across the map, but trying to make small precise movements is pretty frustrating.