Winds & Leaves, which launched as a PSVR exclusive earlier this year, is landing on PC VR early next month.
The game has been listed on Steam with a December 8th release date. Developer Trebuchet says this version of the game will feature enhanced visuals and support for room-scale tracking. Other than that, expect the full 4 – 5 hour adventure.
Winds & Leaves PC VR Confirmed
In Winds & Leaves, you explore a barren wasteland, returning the desolate scenery to life by planting trees that quickly grow into vibrant ecosystems. You move around with an arm-based locomotion system and can even speed up time. It’s a relaxing game with a set pace, but does introduce some challenges in terms of mixing seed combinations to make the right trees for a certain climate and earning new abilities to let you explore faster.
We quite liked Winds & Leaves’ relaxing pace, but encountered several bugs with the game at launch that even stopped us from seeing the game’s end. We decided to hold off on scoring the game until we could be assured these bugs were fixed and Trebuchet has released several patches since. We’ll look to deliver a final verdict once the PC VR version is out in a few weeks’ time.
And, no, there’s no confirmation of an Oculus Quest version just yet. We’ll keep you up-to-date on any more developments for the game. Are you going to be picking up Winds & Leaves on PC VR, or do you already own it on PSVR? Let us know in the comments below!
During the summer, Prison Boss VR developer Trebuchet launched mystical gardening adventure Winds & Leaves for PlayStation VR. Today, the studio has announced that a PC VR version is on the way with a bunch of visual and gameplay enhancements.
Bringing Winds & Leaves to SteamVR has meant that Trebuchet has increased the graphical fidelity, expanded the draw distance so you can appreciate the beautiful scenery whilst improving the tree and vegetation density so those forests look even more luscious. Additionally, a new roomscale mode has been included alongside a 360-degree rotation setting. Employing roomscale freedom should make planting all those seeds even easier.
“We are thrilled to bring Winds & Leaves to Steam VR players, taking advantage of the PC power to make the experience even more captivating with the farther draw distance and higher vegetation density that we can now render,” said Alexandre Pernot Lopes, Trebuchet Creative Director and co-founder in a statement.
Winds & Leaves drops you into a barren world almost entirely devoid of life. You take on the role of The Gardener, a being who has a unique connection to the trees and plants, even being able to see their interconnecting lifeforce. With a few tools in hand, you need to explore the various biomes and plant trees most suited to the environment, combining seeds to make new varieties ideal for each new habitat. The eventual goal is to entirely restore life to the planet.
To ensure a comfortable walking experience Trebuchet puts you on stilts, rather unique for a VR videogame. That means you have to move the controllers just like walking with a couple of sticks, making for steady, gentle progression.
Reviewing Winds & Leaves for PlayStation VR, VRFocus found that: “Winds & Leaves has some nice ideas and for those looking for a nice tranquil VR experience with some light puzzles, it perfectly suits. The problem is Winds & Leaves can be a bit too quiet. Lush green grass and colour forests are all well and good but they’re still devoid of life, no animals suddenly return.”
Winds & Leaves is set to arrive via Steam on 8th December 2021, supporting Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index and Windows Mixed Reality headsets. For further updates from Trebuchet, keep reading VRFocus.
As a videogame fan, there are moments where all-out action just feels a bit too much. Maybe you’re having a lazy Sunday afternoon or simply want to unwind after a long day? It’s in these moments where a slower, more peaceful type of experience comes into play. Where beautiful sunsets and methodical gameplay come into their own, you can’t get much more chill than Trebuchet’s latest offering Winds & Leaves, exclusively for PlayStation VR. However, can a VR experience that mainly involves planting trees be entertaining?
The Canadian studios’ previous title was Prison Boss VR making Winds & Leaves a polar opposite, offering beautiful wide-open vistas which go on for miles and a rich tapestry of colours. Freedom is most certainly on offer here, allowing you to adventure out into a desolate, mysterious land and bring it back to life.
Because you are The Gardener, a being deeply linked to nature who can see the bonds between plants and cultivate them using some powerful magical forces. Much in the same way that Paper Beastleft you to ponder and imagine your own story, Winds & Leaves does something very similar. There’s no direct narrative to speak of or real explanation of who you are, you’re on a once verdant planet that is now barren the only clues being rock paintings and unusual tree-like structures which have to be reanimated.
This natural link also means you can’t simply wander around as you wish, you generally need to stay near to greenery, setting up the core mechanic of Winds & Leaves, planting trees, planting a lot of trees in fact. Each tree you plant will create a lush green area which can then be expanded upon however you choose, going in one straight direction towards a point of interest or growing a lush forest. That’s one of the best parts about Winds & Leaves, looking back and seeing a once dry, harsh landscape transformed by all these trees you’ve planted.
You’re well kitted out with an extendable digging tool, a mysterious weather vane, seed pouch, an energy-containing tree stump and stilts. Yes, that’s right, locomotion in Winds & Leaves is entirely on stilts and works surprisingly well. The videogame is only compatible with PlayStation Move, having to hold the Move button down then waggling the controllers up and down to walk. It sounds a little unusual but isn’t too much different to the locomotion systems employed in titles like Sprint Vector, you’re just on stilts. They also give you the option to lower or raise yourself, great for picking seeds off the ground or moving faster respectively.
It’s not all plain sailing though. The same system for walking is used for climbing trees. So if you’re too close to one then it’s easy to find yourself going up rather than forward. And it soon became clear that picking the seeds off the trees – a vital part of the whole growing process – was far easier than trying to pick them up off the ground, which was finicky and erratic at times.
As for the whole gardening process, that all depends on how much you like continually digging holes. While that energy containing tree stump allows you to walk a short distance away from the life-giving forests, go too far and the roots will pull you back, so you need to get planting. The challenge in Winds & Leaves is careful management of your seed pouch which only holds a measly six varieties of plants, each one having three attributes making them ideal for certain soil conditions. Because of this, there’s a fair bit of seed experimentation and manipulation, planting two or three together to make a new plant, helping you venture further forward.
And this is where that mysterious weather vane tool comes in handy. Time does move in Winds & Leaves just very slowly so the vane greatly speeds this up, making the trees grow nice and rapidly. It’s one of the best effects during the whole experience, watching days flick by in seconds, cloud formations come and go, sunset and rises…you get the idea. While it was always easier to play during daylight, at night there’s an eerie magical quality as you can see the glowing, pulsating connections between the trees.
The end goal is to completely bring life back to this barren place by venturing into four areas and spinning up the giant windmills you find there, all of which point to a central garden that acts as a sort of hub. Once you’ve unlocked certain tree species these can then be found in the garden should you require a particular seed your pouch doesn’t contain. There’s no fast travel so heading back requires leg work until you unlock the glide ability. Essentially a quick dash, it does allow you to traverse the tops of the trees which is always fun.
So you’d imagine Winds & Leaves offers an idyllic world that’s all about being one with nature? Not initially, as VRFocus’ pre-launch review copy continually crashed, occurring six times in the space of an hour at one point. Thankfully, a day one patch does look to have solved that issue. But there are others, like the sheer amount of pop up, especially in the trees. Played on a standard PlayStation 4, once you’ve got a full-on forest going – the whole point of the game – it did start to struggle with all the foliage.
Winds & Leaves has some nice ideas and for those looking for a nice tranquil VR experience with some light puzzles, it perfectly suits. The problem is Winds & Leaves can be a bit too quiet. Lush green grass and colour forests are all well and good but they’re still devoid of life, no animals suddenly return. So you end up walking through your lovely forest world alone, it all feels a bit soulless. Winds & Leaves was enjoyable for the 7-8 hours it lasts yet there was no desire to return.
Winds & Leaves can be overly simple, but its solemn woodland walking hits the mark. More in our Winds & Leaves review.
Note: At the time of publication, Winds & Leaves has some serious bugs on PS5 that hamper gameplay and outright prevented us from seeing the final cutscene. As such, we’ve decided to keep this to a review-in-progress without a score until a fix has been confirmed. The developer says another patch will arrive this week but see our Bug Report section below for more details.
There is a very good chance Winds & Leaves doesn’t speak to you. Trebuchet’s latest is about as docile as gaming gets; a 4 – 5 hour sleepy trek through the woods, planting trees to repopulate the now-barren world with vegetation. There’s very little in the way of challenge to it, and its aspirations of being therapeutic will no doubt condemn it to mundanity for some.
If all that sounds quite appealing to you, though, Winds & Leaves is actually quite lovely. It’s just a little on the simple side.
Remember that old joke about geography classes really just being an excuse to color pictures in? Well, this is basically that joke in videogame form – you’re a weird little farmer-monster-thing with the ability to grow trees by digging out holes, planting fruit-like seeds and then speeding up time to watch them flourish. Gather the fruits of your labor from these fresh branches and then use them to plant yet more trees and reshape the dusty orange wasteland that stretches out in front of you. Walk too far from a farmed area for too long and your health meter — a strange sort of wooden beer stein — will run out, pulling you back into your forest.
Winds & Leaves Review – The Facts
What is it?: A peaceful game about planting trees and reforesting the earth. Platforms: PSVR Release Date:Out now Price: $29.99
It’s a simple concept with a simple eco-friendly message, one that’s notably similar to games like Flower or VR’s own Fuji. Somewhat fleshing out the foundation is the need to match the right fruit to the right soil types. When you dig a hole, three symbols need to be matched in order for something to grow from it. You can solve this by either mixing symbols from two or three other fruits, or finding new ones that might meet your needs at certain points on the map. Once the new tree type grows, its fruit will match the new symbol combo, removing the need for constant double-dipping.
And, well, that’s really kind of it. Winds & Leaves will live and die by exactly how much satisfaction you get from blotting out the last patches of desert and watching your garden grow. And that can be a rewarding treat; watching branches shakily spring to life over the course of a time-lapse, grass bleeding out in front of you as clouds race overhead is definitely the desired kind of meditative, and walking back through sections of the game you’ve already reforested makes you long for the coolness of the shade it provides.
It helps that the game is easy on the eyes, if rarely truly striking. That said, technical limitations hold it back; even playing on a PS5 there’s heavy pop-in when walking through a forested area, with tree branches jumping in and out of view with every step you take, while the ground is constantly redistributing grassy patches depending on where you stand. While not fatal, it’s definitely a shame the world doesn’t have more consistency.
Winds & Leaves is very literally about reaping what you sow, then. Trebuchet wants the cycle of dig, sow, grow to be a balm, and it definitely succeeds, even if it feels like there’s something missing. It’s hard to put your finger on it; perhaps it’s that the process of growing trees never really changes all that dramatically, or that the game’s wordless, isolated world still carries a certain emptiness even after you’ve finished refilling an area. Whatever the cause, it boils down to a sense of over simplicity. You will get some other powers like the ability to glide (or, in VR terms, dash) first from perch to perch and then between trees themselves, and specific weather conditions require you to double up on tree types to withstand harsher climates, but there’s ultimately very little to really push you.
Winds & Leaves Review – Bug Report
Our main review doesn’t consider launch day bugs as it’s often the case that these are ironed out very quickly, but it’s important to note that Winds & Leaves has some very serious bugs at release. Playing on PS5, the game would consistently crash every 20 – 30 minutes for me. Not only that but, when I reached the very end of the game, another crash ended up loading me into a completely broken area making it impossible for me to see the last cutscene. Trebuchet says another patch is planned for the end of the week. With that in mind, you might want to hold fire on picking the game up until these fixes are confirmed.
In fact, most of the game’s challenge comes from wrestling with its clunkier aspects. Your inventory, for example, can only hold six seeds at a time. If you get stuck on a path without the necessary ingredient, you’ll have to do a lot of backtracking to find a fruit that fits your needs, potentially all the way back to the game’s central garden area. Even then actually finding trees bearing fruit can be difficult even if you speed up time.
Locomotion in Winds & Leaves, meanwhile, is actually pretty cohesive – your character is on stilts and you have to move your controllers to walk forwards. A simple, gentle waggle will do, and it fits very well with the game’s pacing, but you hold the same Move buttons to both walk and, when in the vicinity of a tree, climb. It’s easy for the game to get mixed between the two, and also deciding if you want to grab and item out of your inventory or fruit from a branch or tree. The cave painting-style hints, meanwhile, don’t always do the best job of guiding you, and there was more than one occasion that I found myself stuck.
Winds & Leaves Review – Final Impressions
Winds & Leaves is an untroubling little VR game, both in the restorative nature of its farming mechanics and, ultimately, how simple and inoffensive it is. Soothing and wholesome, it’s a game about losing yourself in the satisfaction of honest work and clean living. But, even with the game’s angle of relaxation considered, it’s ultimately just a little too straightforward for its own good and some clunky elements end up holding it back. Winds & Leaves is a breezy remedy for a VR’s otherwise action-packed summer, but it’s only a temporary retreat.
However, with some crippling bugs running on PS5 at launch, we’re not scoring the game just yet. We’ll update this review once we’ve confirmed Trebuchet has fixed these issues.
It’s hot, it’s sunny so why stay inside playing virtual reality (VR) videogames? Because it’s hot, too sunny and quite frankly July has been filled with awesome releases. And that’s set to continue as the month comes to a close next week with more VR titles than you can shake a stick at gearing up for launch. Here are five that VRFocus is looking forward to in the coming days.
Winds & Leaves – Trebuchet
After previously releasing Prison Boss VR Canadian developer Trebuchet returns with a far more open-air experience. In Winds & Leaves you become a virtual gardener bringing life back to a barren planet. Using a unique connection to the trees and plants around you, the only way you can explore the world is by planting forests that provide life-giving energy whilst offering a safe haven to return to. A VR experience for nature lovers.
Supported platforms: PlayStation VR
Launch date: 27th July
Arcsmith – Bithell Games
In Arcsmith you become a space engineer guided by a rather reluctant master arcsmith Korith Dinn. Onboard his usually quiet space station you’ll learn how to construct a variety of space-based items and machinery, fitting parts together in your own way. Whilst these three-dimensional engineering puzzles have specifications to work to, the modular design of the components means you can get creative with each assembly.
Initially due for release earlier this month on Steam, Zombieland fans can get in on the action in a few days. An official franchise tie-in with the films, Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever is an arcade-style shooter testing your aim and speed across a variety of zombie-filled courses. Get two headshots in a row to activate slow-mo, giving you more time to rack up those kills and points to unlock more goodies.
A Steam Early Access title that arrived back in 2018, Vengeful Rights is a big, story-driven role-playing game (RPG) set for an official launch next week. Filled with puzzles to solve and monsters to fight you’ll be able to wield swords, bows and magical abilities as you seek to save the world in this classic fantasy adventure.
From Spanish indie team Entalto Studios, Neon Hat is a very vibrant, cyber racer designed for use with PlayStation Move controllers, each one serves as a rocket booster allowing players to fly around corners and through checkpoints. Featuring its own original synthwave soundtrack, Neon Hat features ten courses across three gameplay modes.
This week saw a flurry of videogame announcements for PlayStation VR including release dates for big titles like Sniper Elite VR. Canadian developer Trebuchet also joined in by revealing that its flora-building experience Winds & Leaves now has a specific launch date, 27th July 2021.
From the team behind Prison Boss VR, Winds & Leaves looks to be the biggest virtual reality (VR) project from the studio to date, offering you the chance to be a virtual gardener bringing life back to a barren planet. Coinciding with the launch date announcement Trebuchet has released the first gameplay trailer for Winds & Leaves, showing a vibrant world just waiting to be brought back to life.
A The Gardener you have a unique connection to the trees and plants around you, and they in turn help you explore the world. Awakening in a verdant valley with some basic tools you need to plant and harvest increasingly complex trees with techniques mastered over generations. In doing so each new forest you grow provides life-giving energy for you to venture further as well as becoming a safe haven to return to.
Exploration will reward you with ancient dormant varieties of trees, new climates, and diverse biomes. You need to find the Outposts littered around the edge of the world as each of these structures contains knowledge to learn new abilities. You also have your own private garden which supports all the plant species you find, offering a constant supply of its particular fruit.
The videogame also features a unique locomotion system for PlayStation VR where players are up on stilts. Trebuchet hasn’t quite detailed how this will ensure Winds & Leaves will be a comfortable experience for all, as there looks to be plenty of walking involved. In any case, it certainly looks gorgeous.
Winds & Leaves is exclusive to PlayStation VR when it arrives in July. Take a look at the new trailer below, and for further updates from Trebuchet, keep reading VRFocus.
Double good news for PlayStation VR owners today. After Joy Way revealed its title Stride is on its way to the platform, Canadian team Trebuchet has unveiled its latest project, Winds & Leaves, where a world of gardening and mysterious relics await.
Exclusive to PlayStation VR, Winds & Leaves is far removed from Trebuchet’s previous virtual reality (VR) title Prison Boss VR. Rather than being cooped up, in this sprawling new world you become The Gardener, the only one who can bring life back to these barren lands.
Walking around on stilts – a locomotion system Trebuchet has designed for the videogame – you have to explore the landscape crossing deserts and empty riverbeds looking for long lost dormant varieties of plant to regrow your own forests and grassy plains. Whilst doing so you’ll be able to uncover diverse biomes and stumble upon ancient, otherworldly monuments which can be awoken by returning the world back to its lush glory. In doing so you’ll learn the important part these imposing structures play.
“We are very excited about Winds and Leaves, as it is our largest project to date,” said Alexandre Pernot Lopes, Trebuchet Creative Director and co-founder in a statement. “We have welcomed a bunch of new faces in our team, and pushed our limits to create something unique and innovative. None of it would be possible without PlayStation’s incredible trust and support.”
As the world will feature player grown trees each will be unique in their design, create dense woodland however you so wish. This is complemented with a dynamic time and weather simulation so the climates will change, as well as a “living soundtrack that reacts to the world around you” the team explain.
Winds & Leaves will be released exclusively for PlayStation VR this Spring. For further updates on the project as the launch nears, keep reading VRFocus.
Winds & Leaves is a calming new game from the developers of Prison Boss VR set to release this Spring exclusively for PSVR that lets you embark on a mystical adventure to replenish a barren land.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq3MDCVFnZw
Winds & Leaves – New PSVR Exclusive
In Winds & Leaves you take on the all-important role of The Gardener, a being whose sole purpose is to re-grow vegetation in barren worlds. A bit like a healer of sorts. From the looks and sounds of it, themes will likely be similar to those in other esoteric and evocative indie games such as Rite, Flower, The Unfinished Swan, and others. That’s very good company to be in if they can pull it off.
A key component of Winds & Leaves will be awakening the latent energy within dilapidated landmarks around the world by using your stilts and gardening tools. The press release also mentions a dynamic soundtrack that adapts to your actions as well as procedural player-grown trees.
If the production values can live up to the potential we see in the trailer above, this could end up being a great late-generation snag for PSVR players.
“We are very excited about Winds and Leaves, as it is our largest project to date,” says Alexandre Pernot Lopes, Trebuchet Creative Director and co-founder, in a prepared statement. “We have welcomed a bunch of new faces in our team, and pushed our limits to create something unique and innovative. None of it would be possible without PlayStation’s incredible trust and support.”
Winds & Leaves does not have a firm release date just yet, but it is slated for PSVR this Spring so it’s not too far off. I’d wager it will come to other platforms later on and is simply debuting first on PSVR.
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
