Folklore Demo (PS3)

The PS3 online store includes quite a few game demos that you can download. They’re all a couple of years old, but I hadn’t played any of them so I dived in. Conan, Wolverine, and Heavenly Sword were all very similar – slog through wave after wave of generic enemies and occasionally complete a sub-Tomb Raider puzzle. Good fun, but nothing that original. I haven’t seen the film it’s based on, but the Wolverine was surprisingly violent.

Folklore was the one that really caught my interest, but possibly the one that unsettled me the most. Its based on a version of British Celtic/Irish mythology that sees the world of Faery as the Netherworld, a land of the death. It even includes strange Faery characters that would have been quite at home in a Neal Gaiman story. So far so good. The artistic direction is very nice and the cut scenes have a comic book design to them. What I didn’t like about the Folklore Demo was that after spending so much time setting up the creepy celtic atmosphere they then jump straight into a Japanese/Pokemon style collect-them-all/RPG.

The combat system basically involves you absorbing defeated enemies, Folks, to preform specific attacks. Except you’re later informed that these Folks are the spirits of the dead! Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of using a person’s immortal soul to power your mystical bazooka just doesn’t feel right. Then again the game designers have hit upon the solution to global warming – use the souls of dead people to power our cities. Come to think of it, wasn’t that the plot to Final Fantasy VII?