LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias is Metroidvania puzzle-platforming for kids. This isn’t to say that adults can’t have fun with it. Maybe “family-friendly” is the better word. It’s a light experience, roughly four hours of non-repetitive play with light narrative elements. You don’t need to have played the first LostWinds to know what’s going on here. This story is as old as time... or at least as old as Tolkien. The Melodias were a race of magical singing creatures who worshipped the wind god Enril. Something bad happened, and now the Melodias have been reduced to a bunch of stone statues. The reason for this is a secret to everybody. Except it isn’t: you control the events leading up to the tragedy, guiding one of the youngest Melodias to an underground cavern where he, like Smeagol, stumbles upon something wicked.

Those familiar with the first LostWinds will be happy to see the return of Toku and Enril. Toku, a little boy with a famous explorer for a mother and an old god as a nanny, is something of a lemming: you “play” him with the nunchuck, directing him to go in a given direction and sometimes pull on things. But most of the time you, as a player, “are” Enril. WotM is a waggle game, through and through. With the A button and a swipe of the Wiimote, you can make a simple gust of wind to push Toku along or move solid objects; holding the B button while tracing a line creates a “slipstream” used to carry flames or water over a distance. This is stock puzzling: move this object from here to there, figure out how to place weight on these two pressure plates, find something to crash through that frozen waterfall, etc.

Winter of the Melodias is beautiful, visually and aurally. It’s all in the little things: how Toku shivers and exhales hot air with a barren snowscape arching behind him, the lush willow trees and steamy pools that emerge when the player summons a hot summer. A short theme swells when Toku hugs his mother; it’s so good that I repeated the action three times just to hear it again. The thematic contrasts between fire and ice, wind and stone are carried throughout, rather than being left to rot as a clever gimmick.

The level design of Winter of the Melodias is tight, like Braid-tight. As there are perhaps only 20 individual “rooms” in this mini-Metroidvania, you pass through the middle of the world at least four times. Each time you criss-cross these sections, though, you’ve got a new ability at your disposal. Instead of simply unlocking new passages, these powers provide different ways to traverse the same space. The ability to instantly change the season from winter to summer is perhaps the most drastic of these; however, there’s something to be said for the utility of the “cyclone.” This mighty power can add a massive boost to your jump height, drill down into the earth to forge new paths, and even convert bodies of water into rain clouds.

There’s a stark contrast between the imaginative design of WotM’s “good” characters--think Japanese folklore--and the amount of effort that must have gone into creating the primary antagonists of the game, the “glorbs.” They’re basically the same “Slime” creatures you encountered in Dragon Warrior during the 1980s--round balls of goo that present no significant threat to your progression. Sure, there are different kinds of glorbs: fire ones, ice ones, big ones, bird ones, and crab ones. You've got to scribble with the B button to freeze the fire ones, and the bigguns will only go down after you pelt them with a snowball formed by drawing a circle with the A button... but after killing one or two of each type, you’re more likely than not going to simply blow them offscreen and proceed on your way. One understands the need for enemies to break up the monotony of advancement through the world, but these vanilla baddies do little to help in that regard. Perhaps, in subsequent games in the series, it might make more sense to follow the enemy encounter paradigm of the Prince of Persia reboot--complexity over quantity.

The only annoying spot in an otherwise enjoyable experience is the way jumping works. Toku is little more than a toddler, meaning he can only climb tiny steps by himself. For most of the game’s platforming, the player must channel Enril’s wind force into a gust that flings the little boy toward his goal. You can gust multiple times in a single jump, but there’s a diminishing return to your efforts. If you don’t gain the necessary altitude within your first two swipes, you’re going to have to try again. At the end of your first play session, your hand is going to be cramped from gripping the A button on the Wiimote so tightly for so long. The only other wonky usability problem is that, after you make a cyclone, your cursor is going to end up somewhere on the other side of the screen (or sometimes glitched out of existence).

With your 1000 Wii points, you’re casting a vote of confidence in short-form narrative game development. Winter of the Melodias isn’t replayable in the way that a traditional puzzle or arcade game might be. Younger children may be able to enjoy it over and over again, but an adult isn’t going to find a compelling reason to return unless they’re interested in speedruns--in which case you’ll find a satisfying balance between optimizing trajectories through the game space while solving puzzles on the fly as Toku moves from one spot to another. The four-hour lifespan of the play experience can also be extended by another hour if the player desires to find all of the secret totems, which unlock story information about all the characters and monsters in the game.

Buy it so Toku can afford a winter coat, stay for the level design, and keep a bag of ice handy for Wiimote cramps.

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Playthrough: Completed over the course of five hours, attaining 42 of the 48 secret totems.

Disclosure: Finished downloadable copy of the game provided for review by Frontier.