By Omar (@siegarettes)

• Welkin Road
  
• Developer- Gregor Panič
  
• Publisher- Nkidu Games Inc.
  
• PC (Steam)
  

These impressions are part of Runner’s High, a series that takes a look at the state of first-person platformers, the simple joys of moving from one place to another, and what we can learn from each of them.

It’s easy to find the genre tropes within Welkin Road: abstract environments, high contrast use of colors and the usual suite of platforming maneuvers. What Welkin Road demonstrates, however, is how of a game’s aesthetic is held within the way it treats your presence within a space. The first-person platformer has always been held together with a volatile alchemy, and for good and for ill Welkin Road demonstrates how much that formula can fluctuate.

The first thing to know about Welkin Road is that it is deeply mouse-driven. There was initially no support for controllers, and even when it eventually came in there had to be a button dedicated entirely to quickly spinning around. There’s a level of precision and reflex that is demanded of you here that leaves little room for error. More importantly, your momentum is influenced strongly by the direction you point your view at. While your intuition, and maybe the laws of physics, might dictate that your body will keep moving in the direction you initially throw it no matter how you turn your head, Welkin Road disagrees. You’ll want to always keep yourself pointed at the direction you want to move in. Where you set your cursor can be the difference between executing a wall run and falling to your death. To that end, you can even do absurd maneuvers such as throwing yourself off in one direction then quickly spinning around to travel back into the direction you came from. This is probably the hardest concept to wrap your head around within the game, and if that doesn’t click with you you’ll likely have a difficult time throughout all of it. I certainly had difficulty with it, and it resulted in a lot of frustration.

The way Welkin Road handles momentum also means that it requires a lot of precision on your part. The way you pan the camera can mean the difference between making and missing a jump. If anything, it demonstrates why the genre often relies on assisting the player. Being able to grab an edge you just missed, for instance, minimizes the frustration of not performing a jump exactly right, something which happens a lot here.

That’s part of a larger problem in Welkin Road, which is that it wants to communicate a sense of bodily presence, but fails to do so. The game asks you to perform maneuvers such as kicking off of walls and pulling your legs in to clear low ledges, but with only your hands visible it’s difficult to tell if you’re doing it properly. This isn’t helped by the weak visual and audio feedback, and the need to whip your head back and forth often to face the right direction. That feedback is a problem that continues when you get onto grappling points, where it becomes hard to gauge your position as you extend and shorten your line. It also resulted in me feeling motion sick from a videogame for the first time in memory. I’m not sure if it was the movement itself, or something about the seemingly static positions of background, but I found myself feeling queasy while playing it.

I don’t want to be too harsh on Welkin Road, however. For all the frustrations, there is a genuine joy to pulling off the sequence of moves the game demands of you. Finding the sweet spot to chain between grappling points is exhilarating, and there is a definite sense of achievement to shortening your time through a course, or pulling off advanced maneuvers that skip entire sections of it. The visual design, as confusing as it can be for navigation sometimes, is beautiful, and I can safely say is what brought me to it in the first place. For a certain type of player, one that is willing to learn the idiosyncrasies of Welkin Road and obsessively replay areas, there’s probably a lot they can get out of it. For those chasing that runner’s high, however, there are too many interruptions to the pace, no periods long enough to work up that self perpetuating momentum.