Folklore asks you to play a dead woman’s memories in a village that hates her, and it works far better than a premise that strange has any right to.
Game Republic’s 2007 action RPG for PlayStation 3 is a game about two people pulling spirits out of the Netherworld with a controller. It is also about a small Irish village, a seventeen-year-old death, and the guilt a town can carry. The combat is the hook. The story is why anyone remembers it.
Trailer, via IGN.
The Letter and the Phone Call
Ellen is a university student with no memory of her childhood. She gets a letter from her dead mother, Ingrid. Keats edits a struggling occult magazine called Unknown Realms and gets a phone call from a woman who says Faerys are attacking her. Both end up in Doolin, a sleepy seaside village that hides a gateway to the Netherworld.
You pick one of them at the start. Each has their own storyline and play style. Ellen specializes in defense and can cloak herself with folk powers. Keats specializes in offense, using brute-force attacks and stronger folk.
Pulling Souls With the Sixaxis
In the Netherworld, Folklore becomes an action game. You fight with the Folk — creatures and spirits you absorb after defeating them. When a folk is near death, its spirit glows red. You lock on and reel it in by shaking and pulling the Sixaxis.
Only four folk fit on the controller’s action buttons at once. That limit is the whole game. You build a loadout, and different folk suit melee, projectiles or magic.
- Capture the folk by flicking the controller at the right moment.
- Assign four of them to the four action buttons.
- Combine their powers against stronger enemies.
There are over 100 unique creatures to capture. The number sounds generous. In practice it means most of them are situational, and you will lean on a handful.
Doolin Is the Best Part
Doolin is where Folklore is most itself. You cannot fight there. You walk, you talk, you take quests. It acts as a hub between the real world and the Netherworld.
The plot turns on that contrast. Murders start happening in Doolin. The victims all knew something about Ellen’s past. Ellen helps the survivors by speaking with their spirits in the Netherworld.
Then the reveal lands: Ellen lived in Doolin as a child under the name Cecilia. Her family shared lineage with Livane, the last descendant of a clan that sealed the Netherworld off from humanity. Cecilia befriended Herve, who was terminally ill. After Cecilia was injured, Herve’s blood donation saved her, but Herve died as a result. The town blamed Cecilia. A Faery had been possessing her.
That is a lot of story, and Folklore tells it through two campaigns that only fully connect if you play both.
What Holds Up
The Faery King wants to merge the Netherworld with the human world, because their conflict had driven the Netherworld into despair. Livane wants the separation kept. The stakes are real.
The soundtrack album, composed by Kenji Kawai and Shinji Hosoe, was released a month after the May 2007 demo. It carries the Celtic setting without turning it into a theme park.
The weaknesses are structural. The Sixaxis reeling is clever and imprecise. Four folk slots is a tight, sometimes frustrating ceiling. And in this writer’s view, the two storylines split the player’s attention rather than doubling it.
The Numbers
- Released: 2007
- Developer: Game Republic
- Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
- Platform: PlayStation 3
- Announced: E3 2006, as Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms
- Co-directed by: Yoshiki Okamoto
- Critic aggregate: 7.7/10 (5 outlets)
Sony never greenlit the two sequels Game Republic proposed. Low sales killed them. In this paper’s view, that is the real story here — a game with a genuinely odd idea, made by a studio that could not sell it.
Folklore is worth playing for Doolin and for the moment the Cecilia reveal reframes everything. It is not worth playing for the combat, which is inventive and rarely comfortable. A 7.7 is fair.
7.7 of 10.
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