While reading up on Wooden Sen’Sey on Steam, I noticed it mentioned hardcore old school gameplay. This didn’t seem to jive with what I was seeing for the first half of the game. Saying that the game was barely resisting my attempts to conquer it was putting it lightly. Where was this hard game the devs seemed to be promising? Well, it shows up in level 5, a sudden sheer brick wall of difficulty that took me a minute to gather myself to deal with. I was ready for the challenge, though. After all, I’d beaten AVGN Adventures not too long ago, hadn’t I? Well a lot of the challenge that suddenly appears in Wooden Sen’Sey comes from dealing with its dicey controls, odd hit detection, and clumsy jumping more than carefully thought out gameplay challenges; creating an experience that is more frustrating than it is satisfying. It can be overcome, but I’m not sure if most people would want to.
For the first bit it seemed to be taking cues from Mini Ninjas, putting you in charge of a little warrior named Goro who looks like he separated from someone’s Fisher-Price set. Many of the characters have this cute, armless toy-like look to them, and this works well with the simplistic shadow enemies running around the game. Nothing looks all that menacing or dangerous, and with the low difficulty curve at the beginning, I just figured that I’d read wrong while researching the game. It seemed much more like it was just some young kid’s game – easy and lighthearted.
It had a lot of stuff to do for a kid’s game, though. You dual-wield axes as your weapons, but they have an extremely short range so I didn’t much use them. They’ll get the job done if you cram yourself down an enemy’s throat, but we have better toys at our disposal. For instance, instead of throwing in a double jump like all of the other platformer kids seem to be doing these days, you can attack downward, hurling your axes under you, slamming the ground hard and propelling your character into the air. Not only does this give you way more height than your regular jump, it also damages enemies and certain blocks. It’s a nice tool, and one I used for combat whenever possible since it was far superior in damage and range than the regular axes. You also get a couple of weapons that aren’t bad like shurikens and bombs, but these are often limited and I tended to run out fast. The downward smash was definitely where it was at.
Then again, a lot of the game’s enemies don’t seem all that enthusiastic about hitting me. Early on there’s a ton of enemies that can’t even be bothered to attack, letting me walk right up into their faces and push into them without trying to hit back. Those that hit back attack so infrequently you’d swear they had a daily limit on how often they were allowed to swing their arms. They do become more aggressive over time, but for the most part, many of them barely attack almost at all, leaving you free to slam them as much as you like with little resistance. Again, I was getting the vibe that this game was just an easy one for kids.
When one of them hit me back, I wasn’t so sure about it being a kid’s game any more. The first time it happened, I didn’t even see what occurred. It took me by surprise, for sure, and I knew I was pushing up against an enemy and attacking it so the enemy had to have hit me, but I’d hadn’t actually seen the attack. After several more attempts to watch the thing attack me, I finally saw this tiny, insignificant flail of its arms — something barely noticeable even when I was looking right at it. It was an indication of an issue that I would have for most of the game, as many of the enemy’s attacks are very hard to see unless they have a large, obvious weapon. The worst culprit were enemies with throwing weapons, as they would only make a little sound to show they were attacking. You’d have to pause and take stock of the screen if you wanted to see the tiny throwing star that was on its way to hitting you, resulting in a lot of cheap hits and even more cheap deaths.
The infrequency of enemy attacks seems to have been put in as a way of balancing out the fact that it is very hard to tell when these enemy models are lashing out at you. In a game that seems to be full of big set pieces and large character and enemy models, it seems weird and out of place for enemy attacks and animations to be so small and insignificant. If you didn’t have so much health in the game and so many opportunities to heal yourself it would be a bigger issue, but the game still has other problems to latch itself onto.
One of those problems is that you have no invincibility time after taking a hit. Big deal if nobody attacks you all that frequently, but the game also loves to toss in platforming over hazards. If you take a dive into a spike pit, expect to take a bunch of hits while you try to pull yourself out of it. Not only that, but as enemies get more aggressive over the course of the game, you can often take three or four hits in a row from one enemy before you can react. At one point in level six I had to get up to some ranged enemies near the roof, and if I didn’t have any shurikens left to deal with them then I had to move straight through their line of attack to hit them. I’d have to take four or five hits just to attack back, and there were several waves of these guys. The devs put a respawning health restoring item in the room, but that felt like more of a patch job put in to deal with an unfair situation they’d created from not giving players post-hit invincibility time. It’s fair of them to do so, but if that’s what they want to do, then they have to set up their challenges in better ways.
The lack of invincibility time also meant that I could take multiple hits from the same attack if I kept landing on the enemy’s weapon. A lot of the tougher enemies later in the game would have long weapons with huge reach, and if I screwed up a jump then I’d take hit after hit while bouncing across the enemy’s weapon. You don’t have a huge blowback after taking a hit, something that seems handy while platforming but just drives you crazy when you’re hopping along a weapon or spiked trap, going from full health to nothing because you just can’t get away.
Which brings me to the sloppy hit detection. I often found I took damage when a weapon still wasn’t making contact with my sprite, throwing my timing off hard. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t adapt to, but then the game has some interesting instant-death traps that I couldn’t see. As one example, there was a platform that raised and lowered, and I hopped onto it when it was heading toward a section of roof. I figured it would kill me and resigned myself to my death, but then I survived. Happy, I leapt off the platform, and as soon as my head touched the plain old roof, I died anyway. There were other traps and sections of the game that killed me despite looking like parts of the background or not communicating themselves well as traps. It got to the point where I was hesitant to touch the images of chains in one of the levels because the large links looked sharp and I thought they’d kill me. Once again, I couldn’t really tell what was going to hit or kill me, and by this point I was getting pretty sick of it all.
So, maybe you’re better off practicing your grappling to stay out of danger altogether. You have another ability which lets you use your axes as a grappling hook, letting you swing around on the roof to avoid trouble. It didn’t feel as intuitive as Bionic Commando (On NES. We aren’t slumming, here), but it does work well with a little practice. You have to be a little reckless with it if you want to gain any decent momentum to move forward, otherwise you only end up doing these tiny swings that won’t get you much of anywhere. Then again, sometimes it’s better to just take tiny swings as some roofs can’t be grabbed onto, something I usually found out the hard way. It often happens around puzzles or traps the devs probably didn’t want players sneaking around, but they look very similar to roofs I could cling to. This made me not bother with the move most of the time since I couldn’t tell if it was going to work and didn’t want to bother trying. It’s a shame because it worked well, but the game slowly taught me not to bother with it by failing to visually communicate, just as it had for many of its other problems.
So, that left the platforming, which felt slippery, but tolerable. I’d often find that the places I could stand on platforms extended farther out than the image would have you believe, or that I could stand inside of some objects at certain heights near the top, so it made things easier to deal with. Just the same, many of the game’s jumps require you to use your grappling hook or downward smash, and if the random changes in what you can and can’t grapple onto don’t kill you, downward smashing will. It ended up being a poor substitute for the double jump as you have to stay over level ground for a moment to get the extra lift effect from it. So, instead of jumping in an arc at the start of your leap, you have to slam down with your axes, lift straight up, and then start moving in the direction you want at the height of your jump. This makes long jumps extremely awkward and uncomfortable, and I died more often than I landed them. It’s extremely irritating to see plain old jumps any other game character could make sitting in front of you and thinking about just how hard they are with the awkward jumping scheme of Wooden Sen’Sey.
The game does have some nice visual charm to it when you’re not scanning the terrain for clues as to what will hurt you and what you can interact with. The locations are filled with various buildings and locations that mingle aspects of ancient Japan and some modern machinery. The former shows up a lot more than the latter, mind you. It’s a pretty game, and the toy-like look of the characters added to the bright, cheery look of the game. The enemies are really drab, though, and are just variants on black blobs with yellow eyes. They would put on armor, helmets, or weapons at times, but they’re mostly just dark blobs with few features. You can tell what they are at a glance (the only thing in the game where that works), but they’re all a little boring to look at because of it.
There’s not much in Wooden Sen’Sey that works fluidly, and the only thing that was saving it at the beginning was that it wasn’t very hard. Once the challenge kicks in during the fifth level, the game’s problems become impossible to ignore as you suffer death after death from the bad hit detection, lack of invincibility time, hard-to-see attacks and traps, and clumsy platforming. It is full of neat ideas to make it interesting, but none of them work properly, resulting in a game that is tolerable when it’s easy and unacceptable when it gets hard. The most dangerous enemy in this game is not some dark blob in a hat, but rather the terrible controls and moves you have to get over it. Just like in an old Kung Fu movie, sometimes the worst enemy is the character himself.
Wooden Sen’Sey is available for $14.99 on Steam.
