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7.1 excellent
Wildhollow, from KarjaSoft, is a point and click adventure game with a hefty monster-farming simulation at the base of its economy. To advance in the game your character needs gold, and the only steady job available is foraging for food to sell to neighbors. Or breeding animals.
You choose to play as either a young man or young woman returning home after studying abroad. (The game plays the same either way - only your character's portrait differs.) Unfortunately you arrive home from university to discover your parents Bruno and Marjorie missing... and their ranch, Wildhollow, partially destroyed! Soon you're chatting with wise-cracking neighbors and strangers alike as you attempt to restore your home and figure out what happened to your parents. Only by venturing far from home and completing a long chain of quests will you succeed.
No situation is so serious that a little tongue-in-cheek humor won't hearten your spirits, and your missing parents are no exception. Everyone's a character, yourself included, as you joke around with all you meet, from cowardly adventurers to lovelorn kings to annoying guards and merchants.
At the top of the screen are four button icons. Three offer information on quests you've undertaken, your inventory and wealth, and game status such as awards won, time you've spent playing, and so on. The fourth icon is a shortcut that immediately takes you back to Wildhollow, your farm, and only appears if you've got any creatures in the pen in need of care. No matter what you're doing, time on your ranch continues to pass, and the game notifies you with an audio cue if an animal needs attention when you're out and about on a quest.
The mouse pointer emits sparkles when it's over anything clickable. The world map scrolls as you near the edges. Clicking on hotspots sends you to those locations, activates minigames, etc. It's worth clicking on everything you possibly can, because - especially early in the game - it might result in a small reward.
The game progresses primarily through conversation with other characters. During these exchanges, static images of your character and the opposite party slide into view on either side of the screen. (Static excepting blinking eyes and moving mouths.) Various topics appear as choices in the middle of the screen; choosing one furthers the conversation. Exhausting a topic might unlock a new one (someone mentioning their job, for example, might then allow you to inquire in more detail about said occupation) unlock a new area for you to visit, activate new quests, give or take an inventory item, and so on. You'll need to try every topic available with every character available to make sure you don't miss something necessary to advance one of your quests.
Wildhollow has a bit of a snarky sense of humor. I didn't really care for the Hitchhiker's Guide, Black Adder, etc. references, but luckily they're few and far between. Much more palatable are the frequent allusions to the silly trappings of popular fantasy. I won't say I laughed aloud at any point, but I was frequently amused.
At some point in the game you'll repair the extraordinarily expensive fence at your parents' ranch and begin monster-farming. Depending upon the condition of Wildhollow, you'll have between three and nine spaces for livestock in your pen. Your animals have three meters that need your attention: food, health, and mood. Feeding an animal the diet it prefers fills its food bar. As the food bar decreases, the animal regains health. Feeding also slightly improves the animal's mood, which can also be increased by brushing it. Animals that go hungry (or are force-fed something they dislike) lose health points... and eventually their health will reach zero. Do they die? No, they just remain at zero health indefinitely. Happy animals show smiley faces in word balloons above their heads. Animals in excellent condition show hearts in their word balloons.
Every animal has a given name (given by whom is never explained) and is either male or female. Three base animal breeds (bunnies, bovines, and catfish) are available for purchase from the neighboring ranch. Another, stranger, breed can be unlocked later in the game. From these four base animals you can breed thirteen different types of monsters. Strangely, cross-breeding the bases doesn't produce new breeds; you must procreate similar bases at the beginning to see any variation. Two bunnies produce a big bun, for example. A big bun bred with a sea feline springs forth a jumper cat. And so on. Animals must be in excellent condition (showing hearts) to be capable of procreation.
Finding food for your animals is where Wildhollow becomes tedious and frustrating. Four incredibly annoying, simple yet ridiculous minigames must be played ad nauseum to forage for animal food until you've made enough of a fortune in gold (and advanced far enough in the game) to buy potions capable of feeding your animals indiscriminately.
To collect apples you hit an apple tree in the center of the screen, causing apples to fly outward toward the edges. You must click on them before they leave the screen. Berries are collected in a timed challenge that tasks you to click on leaves to swivel them aside and look for berries beneath. But you can't click too quickly or the clicks aren't counted. (Every three berries you collect equals one "real" berry.) Mushrooms and acorns are found by taking a magnifying glass into the forest and slowly moving the mouse over and around three bushes. These minigames all require fairly good mouse skills, making Wildhollow unsuitable for laptop touchpad play. The fourth and by far the most annoying minigame, the fishing game, only uses the mouse button but is incredibly difficult. The less said about it the better. I'll be honest: I hated the minigames in Wildhollow and if I could put them in a The Sims pool and delete the pool ladder, I would.
Hint: Once you've bought the compass start building up a supply of mushrooms (the easiest animal food to gather) and acorns from the Spooky Forest, and begin breeding and selling animals. Breed and sell rabbox, which can eat either mushrooms or acorns. Unless you want to discover all thirteen breeds in the game you don't have to worry about fish and apples and berries ever again.
I ran into a few, very minor, bugs. Late in the game I was again given the toilet paper I had already used in a previous quest. Upon completion the game awarded me Award #20 Master Quester for completing all quests, even though I only completed nineteen of the twenty quests. (I have no clue where Cere's Axe is located. I clicked on every lake and talked to everybody but have no idea which lake he threw it into.) Sometimes it was difficult to double-click on a large monster in your pen because the game assumes you're trying to breed it with the animal behind it, and will do so if possible, or otherwise pop up a message telling you that the pair are not receptive to breeding for whatever reason. And the final instructions from a pair of characters about breeding a powerful beast aren't quite as described...
The character art by Rebecca Gunter, on display in many a point and click adventure game, is as excellent as usual, and works better than you'd expect with the stylized background "paintings" by Jeff Ward. I played more than half the game with the background music on, and sorely regret not turning it off sooner. There aren't many background tunes in this title and since you're constantly playing the same minigames, you hear the same song with the electric guitar repeatedly.
Wildhollow just barely got an excellent score, despite the annoying foraging minigames!
Anyone found all the Wildhollow breeds yet.? Here’s what I’ve found:
Bunny + Bunny = Big Bun
Bovine + Bovine = Bat-Eared Ox
Catfish + Catfish = Sea Feline
Big Bun + Sea Feline = Jumper Cat
Bat-Eared Ox + Sea Feline = Seabull
Big Bun + Bat-Eared Ox = Rabbox
There are a few more available – another animal type is introduced a bit later in the game, which opens up four additional breeds and lands the grand total at a nice and even (ehh, maybe not) thirteen.
Hope you enjoy the game!
Miro Karjalainen,
KarjaSoft