Folklore

After the blandness of Resistance I wanted to go back and look at one of the most original titles I've ever played: Folklore.

Set in the somber Doolin village, you play as either the young Ellen, who is looking for her long lost mother, or Keats, a reporter for an obscure occult magazine who is lured there when he gets a mysterious call for help. Both have separate storylines and play styles, and at the end of each chapter you get to decide if you want to continue with the character you've been playing or switch. Eventually, though, the game does force you to play through both before you can continue, so you can't just finish one character's story and then move on to the other. They are intertwined.

That being said, I found it highly rewarding to play through Ellen until I couldn't anymore and then move on to Keats. Keats is a very mysterious and bad-ass character whose motivations, especially if you don't play as him until you have to, are very unclear.

And it's that kind of suspense that drives this game. It's hard to capture Folklore into a specific style of video game, but it's best described as kind of two games in one. For a great deal of the game your character is stuck in Doolin, walking around, talking to people and trying to figure out what the hell is going on. When you first arrive in the village, you find a woman sitting at the edge of a cliff. Or, you think she's sitting there until she falls over obviously dead. Ellen thinks it's her mother, while Keats believes it's the woman who called him, and before they can find out the woman falls off the cliff into the water. You walk into the town and find it populated at night with mysterious creatures who come from the Netherworld, the land of the dead. It turns out that one night a year, the doorway between the real world and the Netherworld opens up, and you've just stumbled there on that day. For their own reasons, both Ellen and Keats enter the Netherworld, and in some awesome cutscenes both go through a tranformation, Ellen donning the cloak of the one who can walk between the worlds, and Keats turning into a demon-looking guardian. After meeting some faeries and dealing with some folk (which I'll get to soon), both return to the real world to find that real people are there during the daytime. As you progress further and further, trying to unravel the secrets surrounding the dead woman and the Netherworld, more and more of the townspeople start dying and revealing more and more of a tragic event that occurred 17 years before. So this part plays like a fantastic and oddly surreal point and click murder mystery adventure game.

Then you step into the Netherworld and things get real interesting. Upon entering you come across these monsters called folk, which suddenly attack you. You are saved by a traveling companion (a creepy scarecrow for Ellen and a sophisticated looking invisible man for Keats) who beats them up and then shows you that they have little red souls popping out of them. With your newfound transformation you are able to capture their souls (or "ids" as the game calls them) and use them. So the two folks who attacked you you are able to use as a basic short range attack and a shield. From then on each folk you get can be mapped to triangle, square, circle or x depending on how you arrange them. Each folk can then also be upgraded either through giving them specific items that drop randomly or by reaching a certain requirement like "Capture 5 of this folk" or "Kill 5 of X folk with this folk". So basically it's kind of like Pokemon except each one has only one move and you use 4 at a time (and can switch any of those out at any point). You use folk to beat up other folk and then capture their ids when they pop out. However, there's a huge variety of folk. You start off in the Faery Realm of the Netherworld, and move on to explore 4 other realms, each of which has something like 15 folk. As such, there are a huge variety of folk that can only be hurt by certain other types of folk. There are some that are only vulnerable to wind, for example. The way you find out difficult weaknesses are by collecting pages for picturebooks from each realm, which show you a vague picture of what you should be doing. Unfortunately many folk look very similar, so sometimes it's very hard to tell exactly what the picturebook is saying.

So you have a kind of slow paced murder mystery along with an action rpg. While the two are completely different and you wouldn't think they'd mesh well together, the styling of each keeps them coherent and working well together. Possibly the best thing about this game are the graphics and the style. There is literally nothing else like it. The atmosphere and buildings of Doolin are appropriately creepy, and then each realm is like walking through a lucid dream. The Faery Realm is forest themed, with vibrant colors and flowers everywhere, while the next realm, Warcadia, is appropriately drab and full of fire from battles. Each setting is amazingly detailed, creative, and artistic. Even just the folk themselves put other games to shame with their incredible diversity and style.

However, putting all the praise aside it has its problems. For one, the storyline is almost too complex/surreal/bizarre to make any sense of. Yes it's interesting, but by the time the final twist rolls around you might be too confused to make anything of it. Also, what could've been essentially double the gameplay by playing both Keats and Ellen turns out to have very much in common with each other. Both of them have unique folk that are specific to their style of fighting, but you end up fighting the same bosses in practically the same ways, and the stories are barely different in terms of where they go. This game also suffers from the unfortunate Pokemon conflict, which is that there are so many of them that it gets troublesome to try upgrading all of them, yet you never know which will be an asset in taking down future folk. There also isn't much replayability, as the odd kind of build your own labyrinth challenge mode unlocked at the end is just kind of...weird, and the story itself is very linear. There are extra quests/costumes that can be bought on PSN, but frankly they're probably not worth it.

Despite these problems it's a beautiful, interesting, and fun game that's got more substance and creativity to it than many games out there.

Folklore gets an 8.5/10