Welcome to my Initial Impressions Review of Indie Developer title Spectrewoods.
General Information
Developed by sole Indie Developer Matthew Green of The Voices Games, Spectrewoods description within the PSN Store is –
“During your midnight wedding in the woods a mysterious occurrence leaves you alone battling spectres.
This is a very short almost walking simulator game which tells a very short story.”
You can see form the offset that this game has been either solely developed, or developed from within a small team. The finished article does not exactly live up to the expectations of the time we are living in; however, we need to as the question of does the game actually try to live up to those expectations? Or does it simply try to be what it is described as?
Playing through you immediately get the impression that there is not going to be a lot going on gameplay wise, but the opening scene does grab your attention.
What is going on…? Well, did you actually read the description in the PSN Store before purchasing this game for $0.49/€0.25/£0.20…? I very much doubt you did, and you were purely grabbing the game because of the price and the promise of an easy Platinum Trophy.
I’ll go over it again for you for you now very quickly. Your first scene shows your “Midnight Wedding”. What plays out after that is a bit of a mystery, as there is no dialogue, or no real update cut scenes until you reach the end of the game. In fact the best way to know what on earth is going on is to read the trophy descriptions as they unlock along the way.
You discover that you are not alone in this journey either, as the Ghosts come along during your playthrough.
The 3 levels within the game will take you no more than 10 minutes to complete, even without the ability to see the control scheme etc. and you will kind of figure it all out by yourself.
Gameplay
Feel free to check out what turned out to be my full unedited playthrough.
Summary
To be fair, there wasn’t much to this game, but how much are we truly looking for in a game that costs next to nothing? The gameplay was smooth and I did not witness any bugs at all during the 7-8 minutes that I was actually playing.
Overall there is nothing wrong with this game for the price point and the story is a little intriguing. Despite Spectrewoods being a little short, I’d certainly like to know more about what has gone on before this point, and I’ll certainly be picking up more of the games from this developer.
You can also get an additional 2 Platinum Trophies for your collection with EU & NA versions of the game available in the relative stores.
Game & Developer Information
Developer Website: The Voices Games
Developer Socials: Twitter
PSN Store Links: £0.20/€0.25 Europe / $0.49 North America
Trophy Information: 12. 
1 / 
11 / 
0 / 
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NODE Gamers 