Doolin Village, nestled amid the rocky Cliff of Sidhe, isn't like any other place on Earth; here, under the right circumstances, the living can not only speak to the dead, they can damn well cross over and traipse around their bizarre forests and fields in a place called the Netherworld. Sidhe may be the Gaelic word for peace, but things are anything but tranquil in this creepy and forgotten land.
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
Ellen and Keats are both lured to Doolin and thrust into the Netherworld in short order. Ellen receives a letter from the Mother she supposedly lost 17 lonely years ago, and Keats is lured with a panicked phone call and the promise of an interesting story for his occult magazine. Each is given a tour guide of sorts: Ellen's is a goofball Scarecrow, and Keats' is an invisible man. From this point on, their stories intertwine, with the end of each completed chapter giving the player an opportunity to continue with the current avatar, or carry forward the trailing thread of the other's narrative contribution.
Whichever character you control at any given moment, the gameplay ritual remains the same. By day, Ellen and Keats investigate the buildings and landmarks of Doolin, speak with the handful of remaining residents, and seek out the mementos of the dead that are required to open a door to the Netherworld each evening. The vast majority of the game's sometimes tiresome exposition occurs during daylight chats, so it seems natural that the nightly excursions to the Land of the Dead would be where most of the action takes place.
If you thought Doolin was a bit strange, wait till you check out the bizarre warrens of the Netherworld's seven vivid realms. Each simple network of fields, paths, and passageways is fashioned by how living souls look at death during life, from the Faery Realm's beautiful candy-colored fields to Warcadia's fiery nightmare of never-ending militaristic mayhem. Meanwhile, the impressive aural atmospheres and evocative top-drawer soundtrack draw you in ever deeper. There's even a simple tile-based dungeon editor to create new challenges with, which you can then upload to a central server for your friends to download and enjoy.
The hallucinogenic storybook atmosphere is intoxicating, and the sense that you're living out some dark modern fable is reinforced by the animated comic book style of most of the cut scenes, which vary in tone from dark to sentimental to whimsical. The unusual way that the story is presented, with each character posed as if in a diorama, probably won't hook those looking for more traditional RPG twists and turns, but it is effective in its unsettling way.
Daytime scavenger hunts and chatty encounters with the dead aside, the majority of play is spent bashing the very souls from a vast menagerie of remarkably varied and inventive beasties, albeit without ever getting your own hands dirty.
Most games that involve any kind of brawling merely give the main character a bunch of attacks and a way of stringing them together into combos. In Folklore, your available arsenal starts with a pair of weak conscripts, and grows with each new foe you beat into submission, until you're commanding four out of over a hundred different creatures by tale's end. The lack of truly wide-open spaces to explore is irksome at first, but diminishes quickly as you open your eyes to all the collectible baddies there are to snap up and master.