Recently launched in Founder’s Access, Tree of Savior is an anime style massively multiplayer action role-playing game whose video capture hot key is the same as Steam’s screenshot key. The accidental video that resulted was too lovely to trash.


Tree of Savior’s visual flair grabbed me while I was flipping through upcoming Steam releases a few weeks back. Flipping through screenshots it certainly looked like my sort of game. The hand-drawn visuals really drew me in, so I picked up one of the Founder’s Packs ($9.99 - $49.99) to secure a month of early access starting March 29.

Bird.


Come March 29 I launched the game, puzzled for a few minutes over how to select a server—there’s a mouse cursor but you have to use the keyboard—and prepared for hours of adventure. Only the first in-game option, choosing a surname that all of your characters in the game would share, would not work. I couldn’t get the keyboard to enter text. I restarted, trying tweaking settings, but nothing would work.

So I gave up, until I saw it pop up in my Steam game list again today.

PRETTY.

Fine. One more try. Searching through the forums I discovered my problem was I had a controller plugged into my computer, which made the game hate me. I unplugged it, and suddenly everything was okay. Discovering an incredibly simple solution to a frustrating problem was annoying, but soon all was forgiven, mostly.

Character creation.


In moments I was exactly where I wanted to be: behind the wheel of an anime-looking character shooting arrows at onions and leaf bugs. I took a screenshot.

And also I took 11 minutes of video. I know there’s a recording counter in the top left, but I had no idea how I turned it on, let alone how to turn it off. I tried just about every button except for the key I knew would take a screenshot, because having that key start a video recording would be silly.


Tree of Savior is silly.

On the bright side, it’s 11 very pretty minutes, and more than enough of a look at the game to help someone determine if it’s the sort of free-to-play thing they’d like to try once Founder’s Access is over on April 28.