Wéko The Mask Gatherer review for PC

You may look at Weko The Mask Gatherer and just see a Zelda clone. And to some extent, that would be fair: it wears its Zelda influences on its sleeve, from its Steam store description (it describes itself as “a single-player, action-adventure game inspired by classic 3D platformers and RPGs like Zelda (OOT), Souls-like, and Spyro”), to the fact that, like Majora’s Mask, masks are an integral part of the gameplay.

And yet, if you were to write it off as just a Zelda clone, you’d be missing a very important part of what gives the game its identity. For that, you have to look at the middle part of that “Zelda (OOT), Souls-like, and Spyro” description: because deep down, Weko The Mask Gatherer is more a Souls-like than anything else.

You learn this very early on – from your very first bit of combat, in fact. Your character (the titular Weko, obviously) meets some villagers being terrorized by monsters, and you’re asked to get rid of them. If, like me, you immediately charge into battle, waving your sword and whacking anything that moves, you’ll very quickly learn the limits of such an approach: you’ll die, and you’ll die quickly.

See, you have a stamina bar in addition to your health bar, and you need to keep a close eye on both. Waving your sword around is a good way to lose all your stamina very quickly, and without it, you can’t even lift your shield to defend yourself – which means, obviously, that you’ll die a very quick death and be sent back to your last save point. Consequently, if you want to get anywhere in this game, you need to quickly get into the habit of blocking, dodging, attacking, and running away.

Depending on your comfort level with Souls-likes, that habit may not come easily. But once it does, you’ll soon find that there’s a lot in Weko The Mask Gatherer to enjoy.

Which is where the Zelda aspect comes to the fore. Once you’ve gotten the hang of blocking and running as much as fighting, you’ll have a nice, big world open up to you, one with plenty of treasure to be found, villagers to meet, quests to undertake, and lands to explore. Moreover, you open up more and more of the game thanks to those masks, which give you new skills like gliding and being able to throw boomerangs to flip switches.

Mind you, mask management is also one of the game’s major challenges. While you can switch between masks at any time, you have to do so in the pause menu – which, going back to the Souls influence, doesn’t actually pause the world around you. That usually means that if you enter a new area unprepared, you’ll waste valuable seconds switching from one mask to another while your enemies get free attacks in, and you’ll probably wind up back at your last save point pretty soon. There are a fair amount of save points, to be sure, so as long as you save regularly you won’t lose a lot of progress, but it still speaks to the challenging nature of the game that lurks beneath its cuter exterior.

In other words, if you’re just looking for a Zelda-like, you may find yourself a little disappointed by Weko The Mask Gatherer: it’s that, but it’s a lot more than that. It’ll challenge you far more than you might expect at first glance, but the end result is definitely worth it.

Hawthorn Games provided us with a Wéko The Mask Gatherer PC code for review purposes.