Woodle Tree Adventures Deluxe (Nintendo Switch) Review

There's that notion in independent game development that time, budget, and work force constraints are to blame. The reality? These are just an excuse, and one that should not be used in a medium that has given birth to Tetris, Pac-Man, Asteroids, and many, many more. Enter Woodle Tree Adventures, a 3D platformer that feels so... barebones, that it's as if its developer simply ran out of steam, and just decided to release its creation as it was.

The problem is not the amateurish look and sound of it all. Sure, levels are more like the carpet of a toddler's playroom than actual grasslands and mountains, and the lack of any music is simply deafening, yet this oversimplified... art style actually has a certain charm of its own, although it would be much better if things were a little more detailed or varied - even if this was actually marketed towards the youngest amongst gamers.

No, the problem here is none other than the gameplay. The concept? Have the tree stump hero run-and-jump around the place, collecting berries and fairy tears, and "slap" enemies with a leaf to make them disappear ('kill them' sounds too brutal for such a title). Is any of this fun? Well, hardly. For starters, collecting berries feels more like an afterthought as, besides strengthening the leaf weapon, these will mostly be gathered for the sake of doing so.

It will soon become pretty clear that the biggest enemy in here is the camera. The game is simply not challenging at all, but camera behaviour will frequently lead to a couple of cheap deaths, whether through not managing to land on a platform, or because you couldn't see that the enemy was right next to you (leaf's range is pretty small, by the way). Even worse, the camera can many times glitch out on you and just do whatever the it wants to - and the same can happen to the checkpoint system, which, every once in a while, decides to send you back to the beginning of a level.

The main thing with Woodle Tree Adventures, however, is just how... empty it is. It's one of those indie projects that feels more like a proof of concept rather than a completed product. As a result, even if there were no bugs and glitches at hand, this would still be a boring 3D platformer, which wouldn't even be enjoyable in 1996. Sure, it's not Bubsy 3D, but it's certainly closer to it than Crash Bandicoot or Super Mario 64.