Woodo is like a cosy colouring book – that’s how three-person indie studio Tiny Monks Tales characterises its game. You have the outline of a colourless scene and need to beautify it by applying colourful items in the right places. This is a good comparison and one that captures the mindful focus and something-do-to-while-doing-something-else-ness of colouring in.
But Woodo isn’t really a colouring book. Its scenes do begin as muted, almost ghostly dioramas, with each object you place painting another little patch of life into them. However, there’s no choice of what colour goes where and no risk of going over the lines. Instead, the pieces are rendered as gorgeous little chunks of wood, painted and varnished, that slot into their predefined homes. There’s something particularly satisfying about watching a grey, indistinct space become a warm, detailed, wooden world one piece at a time.
Woodo is, on the other hand, like a jigsaw. You have a boxful of pieces and need to recreate a scene by finding the right place for each one and fitting them together. This is a good comparison and one that captures the meditative, rote actions of quietly puzzling.
But Woodo isn’t really a jigsaw. Rather than building the picture on the box from scratch, a 3D scene is already there for you to overlay your pieces. You are presented with a UI tray at the right of the screen full of selectable 3D chunks. Some are complete items — a flower, a cup — while some are just parts — an oven door, a window frame — and others, eventually, are not even recognisable shapes, forming just a segment of a character’s head, for example. Finding where each piece goes is less about building a picture than about gradually understanding one.
Woodo is, on the other hand, like a Lego set. You have a boxful of pieces, a schema to follow and a series of 3D creations to build. This is a good comparison and one that captures the guided, creative act of constructing with blocks of fixed shapes and sizes.
But Woodo isn’t a Lego set. Although every piece has a prescribed home, the instructions have been binned. Figuring out a piece’s home is the challenge. You might recognise the shape of something before you understand what it is, or spot an obvious gap but not know what could fill it. The pleasure comes from this deduction and it feels wonderfully tactile to click each little object into place, connecting to the others.
This can be done via the touchscreen when undocked, or with Switch 2’s mouse mode; otherwise, the left stick just moves a cursor. Moving and turning a camera around a 3D scene can introduce a bit of friction, but a combination of the right stick and holding a bumper eventually gets the job done.
Woodo is, on the other hand, like a hidden object game. You have an instruction telling you what to search for, and must find it tucked away, sometimes quite deviously, in an intricate scene. This is a good comparison and one that captures the feeling of learning stories by closer and closer examination of what’s in front of you.
But Woodo isn’t a hidden object game. Some pieces aren’t even there to be found at first, requiring you to unlock new scenes by zooming in or opening something up – opening a tiny door on a mouse hole and finding a house full of cheese, for example. Although the difficulty never gets too far off the ground, what starts as a simple “oh, that cup goes on the shelf” soon becomes “catch that moving lily pad, unlock a magical diorama, discover some new pieces and find a home for those.”
Woodo is, on yet another hand (we’re up to at least three people now), like Witch Beam’s 2021 game Unpacking. You have an evocative diorama in front of you and must take items one by one and set them into the scene, learning what kind of thing belongs where as you go. This is a good comparison and one that captures the tactile, chilled-out intimacy of poring over someone’s personal space.
But Woodo isn’t Unpacking. Unpacking’s story is told silently through the homes you move into and which personal effects make it from one to the next. Woodo does tell a story, but it’s mainly by playing a monologue over the game, triggered by points of progress. The result is nice enough, but the twee tale of Foxy and Ben sits alongside the gameplay like the text sits alongside the illustrations in a picture book – not very deeply woven into the gameplay. I actually found it to be a distraction sometimes, and I wished the game could just lean into the power of its mechanic – and maybe let me listen to a podcast.
That’s not to say, meanwhile, that the delightfully soothing (and at times gently angsty) music, and the wooden-block sounds, aren’t up to scratch. Getting fully into the game’s world is wholly satisfying – it’s just that sometimes it might provide an accompaniment to doing something else.
Woodo is — get your other hand ready, person three — like Max Inferno’s 2022 game A Little To The Left. You have a motley arrangement of pieces and must bring them into order. This is a good comparison and captures the just-so satisfaction of sorting out a collection of clutter.
But Woodo isn’t A Little to the Left. That’s a puzzle game, whereas Woodo, while it resembles a jigsaw puzzle, won’t leave you scratching your head very often. There are some deviously hidden objects, and some tricky-to-align pieces, but that’s not really the main thrust. In fact, the hint system, which will flat-out tell you exactly where to look, doesn’t break the game and is sometimes welcome if a touch of frustration starts to creep into your cosy mindset.
By combining different facets of an assortment of peaceful activities — colouring-in, jigsaw-puzzling, Lego-building and more — Woodo hits on a formula for pure relaxation. Its gorgeous presentation, both graphics and sound, makes it irresistible to interact with.
There’s a lot of repetition involved in getting into the zone, and sometimes I wished the storytelling would get out of the way and lean into the unspoken feelings that the dioramas convey without a voiceover. However, none of that was enough to snap me out of its cosy spell.
