However to actually absorb the Folk Id you must engage in a little mini game that is probably the best use of the Sony Sixaxis thus far. As you attack enemies a blue image of their form will emerge from their bodies. Once you have done enough damage they will stop in place, stunned, and a red image will hover over them. This is when you press the R1 button to project a stream of energy from you to them that attaches to their Id and starts the mini-game.

For basic enemies all you need to do is move the Sixaxis controller upwards and you will yank their soul out and into your body. For bigger enemies, and bosses, things get a bit more complex. Some will require you to jerk the controller from side to side as you attempt to beat their Id down and yank it out of their bodies. Others will require you to time your controller movements upwards to coincide when the enemy Id glows red, as opposed to the green it will glow most of the time. Both of these methods must be done until you have filled the meter below the folk. Once it is full you will have succeeded and the Folks Id is yours.

The biggest success of Folklore is the graphical design. While the game itself isn't the best piece of work on the PlayStation 3 the art design more than makes up for it. All of the netherworlds you will adventure in are richly detailed and wonderful to behold. Even the creatures have an almost exaggerated, storybook look to them but it works really well in this game. So while it won't beat out Uncharted you will likely not even notice the difference. The only real graphical failure is the character models. Keats and Ellen move fairly stiffly through the game world and there is a lack of fluidity to their movements, looking like moving mannequins. They do however look great when using Folks.

The storyline here is moved forward in one of three manners. You have your run of the mill in-game banter where you will converse with other characters via speech bubbles. The second method are actual cutscenes that look fantastic and have some incredible voice acting (I love the Irish accents). However these cutscenes are few and far between, relying mostly on this games comic style cutscenes.

The basic way that these cutscenes work is that they are like moving comic book panels. The game will scroll from panel to panel for you and dialogue will pop up as the dialogue moves. This is both a strength and failure since some of the dialogue can move too fast to be read comfortably, requiring you to make liberal use of the rewind option given to you. With the lack of spoken dialogue and sometimes hard to read speech bubbles these really never grew on me. They also don't hurt the game; it's more of an irritant than anything.

You do get a great feel for the characters in these cutscenes. So while Ellen might initially come off as your stereotypical memory lacking hero the story does a great job of revealing more information about her over time and drawing you in. Even more so than Ellen, Keats is a great character. Not only is he a scientific minded person working for an occult magazine, a dichotomy that works well for approaching things with a realistic mindset, he seems to have some greater link to the Netherworld than you might expect. It does a really good job drawing you in.

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