Where the Wind Once Blew Free is a hard story about hard people — a soldier who’s watched his friend blown to bits, a kind but weak man whose courage will determine others’ fates, a young girl running for her life. There are moments of softness in the game — such as a shared embrace between two survivors — but they are few. It’s a game with an ethos I don’t see much in IFComp: There are no jokes, no parody, and no witty references. It’s not a relationship simulator of any kind. There are no intricate puzzles to solve. Instead, it’s a game about people too well-acquainted with war, grief, violence, and old-fashioned injustice trying to do the right thing and to survive. It’s an unabashedly unironic Western, for those who know what that means.
Formally, Where the Wind Once Blew Free is a choice-based light RPG. There are hyperlinks that give different options, your stats can go up or down based on your choices, and many actions require a skill check in order to perform them successfully. The game also features a “god mode” in which your stats are set super high from the beginning, allowing you to play through the story without having to worry about stat-tracking. I invoked this after dying a few times, although somehow I still managed to fail two lore checks. You also play as several different characters over the game, which is a little odd since you retain your stats each time you switch to a new person. The setting is reminiscent of the American southwest, but the characters are all sentient human-sized (or larger) animals.
When I first started playing I was confused by the story: It was jumping around too much for me to be able to follow it easily, and too much was happening in the first character’s head rather than going on around him. After the second chapter the narrative started to settle down, though, and after dying and restarting I was able to follow the first chapter much better. Still, it was not always clear when a choice would increase or decrease my stats or even that I needed to have a particular stat at a certain level in order to succeed at an action.
The game’s interface has some attractive features and detail, although I think there’s too much contrast in the color scheme, and too many things were blinking at me while I played the game. I also found a bug where the game got stuck and wouldn’t let me progress.
But after several chapters I found that I wasn’t paying attention to the game’s technical details anymore; I was too gripped by the story. I can’t say that the ending was a surprise, but I was invested in the characters, and I wanted to help them succeed and reach that ending.
The blurb of Where the Wind Once Blew Free says that it was written by a group of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. It certainly bears the mark of people who have been to war and have seen things that most of us non-veterans never will. Near the end it also slides into what feels like a critique of American society — a critique saying, at its heart, that we don’t believe in ourselves anymore. It’s a worthwhile critique yet one I rarely see in an artistic medium. I’m glad Where the Wind Once Blew Free is in IFComp, and I think it will stick with me a while.
An Exercise for the Reader 