It’s gotten awfully cold out lately. A perfect time, then, for getting yourself wrapped up in a nice nook with a hot drink and a spot of knitting with Weaving Tides. Developers Follow The Feathers this week released a free demo for their pleasant, aerial knit ’em up, letting you sew your way through the story’s opening or else freely embroider your own creations over an empty canvas.
Jay and I both took a liking to Weaving Tides over in Screenshot Saturday Sundays. It is quite a lovely thing to look at, too, both in its cuddly cloud-like sheep and Halloween quilting.
The bulk of the demo lets you poke at Weaving Tides’ main adventure, which sees you and a dragon (your dad, apparently) set off across the land to help sew the neighbour’s farm back together. Trouble ensues, and you quickly find yourself off on a dang videogame adventure that sees you travelling the dangerous, knitted wilderness.
Like that lass from Journey, however, you’re trailing a long ribbon behind you. Hold the right trigger, and you can duck below the net-like webbing that makes up the bulk of the environment. Thus begins a neat twist on fairly usual adventuring – pulling shut gaps, weaving together small puzzles, and luring monsters into positions where you can tangle them up in your thread.
Alternatively, you can head over to the game’s “playgrounds” for some entirely stress-free stitching. These blank quilts let you craft anything you’d like using the game’s arsenal of ribbons, with the option to even bring in external images as references to sew over. I was dreadfully bad at this in my five minutes experimenting, but it’s the sort of thing I can easily see enabling some properly creative works in.
If anyone manages to knit together a horrendous Christmas sweater, do let me know. ‘Tis the season and all.
The Weaving Tides demo is available to download over on Itch, though the full release will also hit Steam when it arrives early next year.