It feels more like the first level given to you on a demo disk
Lost Winds is a brilliant concept. The gameplay works flawlessly about 99% of the time and the gameplay is very interesting. Its an action/puzzle game all using the various wind powers you collect along the way. You will use gusts of wind to move rocks onto switches to hold doors open or launch yourself through the air or knock baddies into the ground breaking them. You will use special wind to blow fire into flammable walls obstructing your path or blow water onto plants you need to grow. You can make a vortex around objects to make them spin, hovering in the air, then launch them much faster than you normally could. And so on.
The objective is to use these various winds to get past puzzles and reach your goal. The game feels very inspired by Okami using the wiimote as the wind drawing various commands (lines circles etc.) to interact with the environments and the whole concept is great. I enjoyed doing it but thats just it I wanted more.
Now I understand that this is a wiiware game and not a full $50 retail disk game BUT that doesn't change the fact that its short. People said that it took them 3 hours on average and some people who aren't quite as good at puzzles took a little longer. Well call me the puzzle god because I finished this game in barely over two hours and no I did not use a guide. I was able to practically sprint through all the environments because for me at least the puzzles were fairly simple. I would walk into a room see a rock, a breakable wall, a sound orb, and a crystal wall. Ok break wall with rock get sound orb to crystal advance to next room.
Due to the extreme simplicity of the puzzles and several other factors like the world you are in is really pretty small and there is only one boss I'd really like to call this whole game a single dungeon. This game reminded me of the temple in Legend of Zelda TP where you are in the snow mountain and you keep looping around going to locations you are told to go to only to find a pumpkin in the sense that Lost Winds has you running back and forth through the small world exploring a little deeper each time to find either Deo's memory or crystal things.
Based on this I'd like to call this game a demo. Before LOZ came out you could play the first dungeon at stores and this is basically exactly what that felt like to me. In fact the Ice Dungeon I mentioned earlier took me about the same amount of time as this whole game (partially because of those ice block puzzles. things take me forever) which leads me to believe that this game is just one level.
This is a sample, a tease, a mere portion of the game. Because of this what I would really love to see is a full retail version that takes the brilliant concept and expands it into a full length game.
At the end of the game after you beat the boss it just shows a cutscene telling you how the characters go on and fight the main evil guy they talked about at the beginning. Why not remove the cutscene and allow us to play out this adventure?
So all in all this is a great concept and I love the ideas they used in it. This feels like a demonstration the devs would show to a publisher in order to get further funding and produce a bigger better game and in a lot of ways that's really what it is. I would not be surprised if a full retail addition to the series hits shelves sometime in the near future and I will also be in full anticipation of this day. This is a brilliant concept and all I can say is I wish they took it and expanded it further.
As far as scores are concerned I'm going to cut the game some slack because it is just a wiiware title and it is only $10.
I give it a 7.5 because I love the ideas and I love the gameplay and the concept but it just isn't enough. The story isn't anything special but that's really not the main focus. The music is actually pretty annoying but I only had to deal with it for a bit over 2 hours. I would recommend you play this game because it really is a wonderful while it lasts but don't be surprised if you finish the game yearning for more.