Mable & The Wood Critic Reviews

One key feature in the game that makes it an interesting play is the use of pixels. I love the retro style pixelated characters and game world.

Mable and the Wood is a side-scrolling metroidvania game with a unique combat/traversal mechanic. The form you start with and ones you unlock are fun to use for the most part. Reading the map can be annoying, but it's possible to interpret. Multiple endings offers more replay value if you're inclined to do so.

I am glad to see that Mable & the Wood was able to maintain the level of quality that I saw in my earlier preview. The platforming has a nice flow to it with a good balance of enemy hazard and platforming challenge. If you are a fan of metroidvania and or retro styled platformers I recommend you give Mable a chance.

Mable & The Wood is no cakewalk and there are brief moments where you’ll struggle to make progress. But promise of new abilities and new areas to explore will keep you playing – and when you leap, slash and swing your way to them, you’ll never be disappointed. Mable & The Wood oozes charm from beginning to end and, even in a market that isn’t short of Metroidvanias, it more than distinguishes itself.

Mable & The Wood on PC is really enjoyable at times and very frustrating at others. Furthermore, Mable & The Wood caused a full cycle of emotions while playing through the main story.

Mable and the Wood is a seductively whimsical fantasy adventure with excellent graphics, music and a lot of good ideas, but for the moment it is held back by balance and technical problems.

You start out with a sword, for instance, that allows you to turn into a fairy and briefly fly while the sword remains anchored. Press the button again and the sword zips back to you in a straight line, cutting through whatever is in the way. As Mable beats various bosses, like a giant spider and rock monster, she gets their powers, which all work in a similar way. It’s creative and distinct, and also frequently frustrating as hell.

In the end, Mable and the Wood isn’t a bad game. It takes a familiar concept and throws in something different with combat and traversal, and it works for the most part. I just think some of the execution and sense of direction was handled poorly. I almost expected after beating a boss that I would have to spend 20 minutes trying to figure out where to go next after getting a new form to use, and that’s not ideal. People looking for something different will find it here, just know that it comes with some issues, but altogether, it is a decent experience.

Quotation forthcoming.

An inventive take on the Metroidvania formula, but is let down by some awkward platforming and combat.

As usual, I find myself wanting to like games which just straight up annoy the shit out of me. There are some nice ideas here but I just got too frustrated after a while trying to get past sections which were just so much trickier than others, and required a lot of swapping of powers, and pulling off what amounted to combos of moves I just couldn’t swing with.

Mable & The Wood comes with an interesting take on combat, but shoddy controls, bugs, and odd storytelling prevent it from being an enjoyable journey through the game's cursed kingdom.

Mable and the Wood is a short metroidvania game, with a good difficulty level that challenge us without being too difficult to made us quit. It could be enjoyable if they fix all the bugs that exists in the game nowadays.

There are many unique mechanics introduced here that have a lot of potential, but between the lack of interesting ways in which said mechanics are used and the terrible controls, they only work to hinder the game. The game is also one of the buggiest games I’ve played; its litany of bugs range from falling through walls, to abilities that don’t work correctly or unintentionally trivialize encounters and obstacles, and even bugs of the game-breaking kind. This is a game with great ideas but horrid execution, both from a technical and a design perspective, and it’s really a shame. Here’s hoping the developers will take what’s good here and execute better on it in the future.

Mable and the Wood isn’t a big game, but a person could spend a few hours on it and walk away feeling like they’d spent fifty. Drab, ugly, and at turns borderline unplayable, Mable demonstrates how quickly a good idea can become a bad one when it’s so thoroughly misapplied.