Speaking of bounties, combat plays its part in the experience. You’ll check in with them all regularly except, perhaps, 20/20, who you’ll forget has bounties up until the postgame when you decide to spend a few hours relaxing and hunting achievements. One guy offers area maps, another has bounties for you, another rewards you for finding objects around the map – these are a bit like the ‘artefacts’ you may remember collecting in the Pikmin series, and their descriptions by a befuddled Greenshield is a fun tribute to the archaeological efforts of Captain Olimar and friends – another has rewards if you find her cats (yes!), and still another is a shopkeeper. The Greenshields are a friendly bunch and most of them have some utility, too. Sometimes you need other macguffins to access the important macguffin, but at least in those cases you’re doing stuff like finding flute parts for a friendly Where The Wild Things Are monster or finding rotten oysters to make a raccoon dragon throw up.
There are, I suppose, just enough macguffins. We don’t spend ages going back and forth or chasing a lot of macguffins. After that you need some artefacts, and from there it’s on to the big showdown. They’re also scattered and lost, and your first real task is to find the lost Greenshields and send them home. The basic story is this: the Greenshields are losing their grip, both on the Deep Woods that protect the outside world from The Never, and on what remains of their memories, which are fed upon by The Never. This is a narrative that delivers thanks to writing that is playful and funny and warm characters who are pleasant to spend some time with, rather than through convoluted plotting and contrived surprise. There aren’t any major surprises and, if you’re the type who thinks stuff through or just someone who talks to every NPC repeatedly, you’ll see the game’s twist coming. Things are getting worse, and that’s why they’ve decided to bring in some outside help, in the form of a traumatised twelve-year old boy. Unfortunately the Greenshields, as they’re known for short, have forgotten that name along with their own and much else besides. The Deep Woods exist to contain it, and the guardians of both are called the Hermetic Order of the Verdant Shield. Yellows are fast workers who can ignore poison fumes reds are immune to fire and can ignite thorny bushes blues are immune to ice damage and can create walkways across shattered ice purples can smash crystals and stick to rope-and-pulley barrels the final type, the ‘lunalings’, gain in strength at night and can create light that suppresses The Never.Īh, we’ve not yet talked about The Never. The latter is vital as they each fulfil their own roles. Certainly your spritelings – the friendly herd beasties who are the player’s most effective tools – are adorable and distinct. I couldn’t tell you what that style is but I can tell you that it is immensely charming and features a cast of lovingly animated and designed characters. The Wild at Heart’s art style works for me. See, the comparison is good for The Wild at Heart!) This scarcity means hungry Pikmin fans may jump on any game which offers comparable fare. Beyond that I’m only aware of the forthcoming Tinykin and Little King’s Story, a Wii game I’ve never played.
THE WILD AT HEART ICE SPRITELINGS SERIES
The Overlord series managed two games and an expansion, and they are slightly Pikmin-like.
Pikmin games are rare, as the series has never sold as well as the other Miyamoto golden geese. (If you are a fan of the Pikmin series, you’ll be aware that there’s very little else that scratches that itch. I’m getting this out of the way now, because from here I am going to casually reference Pikmin staples – if you lack familiarity with that series you will be just fine reading this, and also you should play Pikmin – and this will help in highlighting where The Wild at Heart champions its own voice, style and mechanics. It’s a comparison that it’s senseless to try and avoid because there is much here that can be traced back to Miyamoto’s cult classic series, and talking about The Wild at Heart is aided by using Pikmin as a reference point.
The game’s developers recognise that comparisons with Nintendo’s Pikmin series are inevitable and they acknowledge the relationship. Kirby, somehow, soon follows, and the two friends meet up not long into the game. Things immediately diverge from that plan as the guardians of the Deep Woods draw Wake into their world. The two friends have agreed to run away together and live in the nearby woods. His younger friend Kirby has a neglectful single parent, although we see nothing of her home life.
THE WILD AT HEART ICE SPRITELINGS TV
Its protagonist, Wake, has lost his mother and is running away from a spectral father figure slumped in front of the TV and surrounded by beer bottles. The Wild at Heart opens with scenes that suggest trauma and broken homes.
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