A fantastic, truly expert platformer full of challenges, and delightful exploration opportunities and colorful characters in a fully-realized world full of depth and secrets, ideal for 2D platforming veterans. Don't let the easy beginner levels and calm visuals and music fool you. The game doesn't do a whole lot of handholding or easing you in. If you're not skilled, you will seriously struggle in this game, and more than likely rage. The number of leaves required and boss sections demand it. With my limited skills, I could only get about 67 or so of the 70 required leaves to beat the game without resorting to [strike]cheating[/strike] accessibility mode.
Wishbind has two discrete gameplay pillars. The first is the challenge of overcoming platforming levels of varying difficulty. You access these challenges by navigating the game's second pillar, its wide open world, to instill a sense of wonder and exploration left up to the player's devices.
Due to being a highly-focused 2D platformer, the movement mechanics are extremely polished, feeling slick and responsive, if having some rather obscure bindings. For instance, WASD is typical, but then you have a second set for your other hand's actions, IJKL, and that can take some getting used to, as they're not using common PC action keys like Z, X, the Spacebar, or Shift. Default gamepad bindings are slightly more sensible, but still face bizarre oddities. Back button is B, right? No, of course not, you silly person! "X" is for going back. The "B" stands for bupkis, since it literally does nothing the entire game. Not even the rhythm minigame! Weird, right? Also, you can't switch between analog thumbsticks and the D-pad on the fly. You have to use one or the other, and rebinding directions in the menu is tedious. Sensitive thumbsticks make it hard to land on one choice, or when you're halfway through rebinding, only half of menu can be navigated by analog sticks. The default controls are unintuitive and rebinding has obstacles of its own. It'll take some time to tame them, but the game controls perfectly well once you untangle that Gordian knot, such as by my "Essential Controller Improvement" in Community Layouts.
The game also runs buttery smooth barring a few frame drops in the deep forest swamp, and the rooms with the eyes, which I'm guessing is an unoptimized raycasting issue, but they by no means break the game.
Due to the open nature of the game, outside of a scripted section or two, such as the beginning tutorial to village section, or the odd milestone, there is nearly no structured pacing, since it's entirely up to the player. You have the introductory tutorial, which thankfully is self-explanatory enough (you're welcome by the way, reader, I provided feedback on its refinement), but it's a bit of a drag on the early pacing, since you're assaulted by a big exposition dump immediately afterwards. Then another. And then just when you're starting to enjoy the game opening up into the beautiful wilderness, there's a giant village in your way. Right when you're aching for some freedom and itching to get away from all the backstory and infodumping, the game drops the biggest chunk of it right in front of you, rather than spacing it out after a healthy handful of challenges so things don't get repetitive. At least it's not mandatory to stop and listen like the artist's or villagers' dialogue.
Thankfully, after that, you're totally free to roam the world. This serves a bit as a double edged sword. On the one hand, it's great if you want to immediately switch goals after doing the same thing for a long time, swapping up the gameplay, environment or difficulty, but on the other hand, when you're playing the game for the first time, you have no idea where you should go, since there's no gating. You have to guess, essentially, and that can lead to an extremely wonky and erratic difficulty curve. You have to decide what challenges are too easy, too difficult, just right, and when to vary the gameplay by swapping from platforming to visiting NPCs and villages.
The stars, too, don't feel like a good benchmark for indicating difficulty. They don't mean much, they're extremely subjective, and each level has the same reward of one leaf, the required item--no secondary goals. As mentioned, the platforming is the meat of the game, so if you don't have sufficient skills, you could be missing a huge chunk of the content in Wishbind.
Wishbind is quite binary. And I don't just mean that literally with keyboard-first controls that don't account for analog gamepad buttons, though that is also the case. The real way Wishbind is binary is its total separation from its light, relaxing wide-open exploration elements with no sense of pressure or external dangers, naturalistic, encouraging you to take your time and examine every nook and cranny, chat to a bunch of characters to see if they have anything interesting to say (most don't, so you really don't have to talk to anyone if you're interested in game completion, almost all of it is personal backstory that doesn't matter though every character is fully realized), and its super raw platforming gameplay worthy of an early Nintendo title.
Weird key bindings and pacing issues aside, it's obvious Wishbind is an extremely well-made game crafted with heartfelt passion, worthy of any player who enjoys 2D precision platformers, and exploring the world. The art style and music are impeccable, and the variety is quite high in the environments, so even during frustrating moments, where you're forced to either exit the level, or cave to accessibility options, there's always a new place you can pick and choose to explore, and I had a delight checking out everything it had to offer, even though I'm clearly way out of my depth with the full game.
