Stuck on what to do in Winds & Leaves for PSVR? This handy guide will get you on the right path.
Winds & Leaves is a good PSVR game but it’s definitely flawed. It doesn’t do a good enough job at telling you what you need to do or how its systems work during the short story. It’s vague to the point of frustrating. Luckily for you, I’ve been all around Winds & Leaves’ islands and I’ve got a few tips to set you on your journey.
How to glide in Winds & Leaves?
I’ve had this asked to me a couple of times already, and yes, you can glide, but you need to get a couple of hours into the game before you get the ability.
This… is annoying, and it feels like the game is deliberately misleading players. If you check the control menu in the pause screen, you’ll see instructions for how to move and how to glide. Given that your character has hands that look like falcon claws, you’d think that maybe you could climb to the top of a tree and take a leap of faith from the top. Nope. Get further into the game and you’ll see…
How do I get different seeds?
This actually took me way too long to figure out and it doesn’t help that I missed a vital seed early on.
Each seed has a set of symbols denoting which soil it can be planted in. Take out your planting stick thing, dig a little hole, and you’ll see which seed can be planted there.
The first two seeds are freebies that the game gives you, but you’ll eventually hit a point where you need a seed that has square markings on its profile.
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On that same island is an area where you can sprout a large tree. There’s a structure towards the end of the island (going to the left from the way you entered) and once you grow this tree, it will start to drop the seed with the square markings. You might need to speed up time to get some seeds to fall, mind you.
I missed this and was left wandering around for a couple of hours, frustrated that I couldn’t make progress. Well, now you know, and because I told you, not the game.
So, about making new seeds. Mix and match! Look at the soil type needed and if you don’t have the exact seed already, chances are you’ve got some that can be planted in the same hole (they must share characteristics required for the soil) and they’ll grow a tree that produces the seeds you need. Collect the seeds, carry on your journey.
I keep dying! And what’s up with the fog in Winds & Leaves?
If you keep dying in Winds & Leaves, you’ve probably missed a key bit of information during the tutorial. I did, too, but I figured it out eventually.
See that little log thing? Notice the light on it? That’s your health, basically, and it runs down whenever you’re travelling through an area that hasn’t got trees and grass growing out of the ground.
You can avoid dying by making sure you’re planting your seeds as you go, growing a forest in your wake. Sometimes, though, it’s not possible to plant trees and you just need to power on.
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For example, if you’re dying in the fog in Winds & Leaves, make sure your health is topped up before you enter it. You can top up your health by going to a leafless tree (they’re the glowing things with roots on the ground) and drop your log thingy into the hole. Let it juice up, then take it back. Voila, you’re now at full health and you should be able to get through the fog in Winds & Leaves. It’s a necessary journey, so it can be done – each island is separated by the stuff.
What do I actually do in the game?
Again, the game does a piss poor job at telling you what you’re supposed to do. The majority of the gameplay instructions are paintings on rocks. This isn’t ideal at the best of times, but the game has another problem – sometimes it doesn’t actually show these pictures, or at least not properly.
You might come across a scrawled painting on a rock only to find that half of it disappears depending on where you’re standing. It’s… annoying.
But, no matter, you’ve got Chris to help you out!
I won’t spell it all out for you – I don’t want to ruin anything, you know? – but here’s what you need to do in Winds & Leaves:
- Collect as many seeds as possible
- Plant as many seeds as possible to grow huge forests
- Find windmills and plant your trees around it
- Find the “main” mill on each island and activate it
- Go back to the main island and, depending on which seeds you have, visit the other islands, rinse and repeat.
- Also, explore.
Winds & Leaves keeps crashing! What should I do?
If you’re unfortunate enough to have the game crash on you repeatedly, then you’re better off putting it to the side until the game’s developer has released a new patch.
Trebuchet has stated that an update is on the way to fix the game’s crashes and to improve the performance of the game.
Funnily enough, I only had one minor crash when I played on PS5 the first time around. Then, when I went back to the game to collect footage for the video review, it crashed after about an hour of play. This was to be the disaster that ruined my evening because the game didn’t just crash, it crashed, flipped, rolled, and tumbled off a damn cliff before exploding.
So hard was this crash that when I rebooted my PS5, I couldn’t get past the PS5 logo. The PS5 logo would fade and then I would have a black screen.
I booted into safe mode and tried everything until the only option left was a factory reset. Yep. My console was fooked and I had to reset it and lose all of my data, games, and video captures in the process. It sucked, massively.
So, if you are getting hard crashes, put the game away for now and wait until Trebuchet has released a new update to fix the problems with Winds & Leaves.
Those are the basic tips and tricks to get making some progress in Winds & Leaves. It’s a chilled-out game and really quite wonderful to look at, but it’s a shame that it’s not better at communicating to players. Thank goodness for guide writers, right? If you appreciate guide writers, news writers, and reviewers, please take a stand against plagiarism. There are some real scumbags out there stealing the hard work of others, and it’s not OK.
