An ambitious action/adventure/role-playing game hybrid, Folklore tells the tale of a series of mysterious murders in Doolin, a small, token-Irish fishing village by day, gateway to artsy fantasylands by night, and of the two people setting about to solve them.

Seeing as your average villager is too busy hiding skeletons in the closet, a fella named Keats, a investigative occult journalist is on hand to do his thing and also lend his expertise to Ellen, a young woman with a mysterious past, beckoned to Doolin by her allegedly long-lost, thought-dead, apparently-not, mother. You play as both characters, separately, with differing narratives for each, though their story arcs are ultimately the same. And, since you're sorting through the clues to solve the mystery anyway, you might as well stop a war raging in the Netherworld while you're at it.

As it happens, not all is happy in the Netherworld (go figure). No, manifesting itself only at night, the Netherworld is a contentious place inhabited by, among other things, "Folk." The folk, in fact, are your primary foe but also act as your arsenal of weaponry, acquired by sucking up their souls after a beatdown, thus capturing their "id," in turn summoning their id at will to act as your select weapon for whacking and shooting and sucking up new souls.

Ripping souls out of Netherworld folk involves yanking the motion-sensitive SixAxis controller towards you, sometimes giving it a twist and heave-ho or two. Using ids as weapons is rather novel, but the yanking mechanic, though satisfyingly visceral, can start to wear on your wrists after a few hours, at which point things start to feel literally repetitive.

Still, it is in the yank-happy Netherworld that Folklore looks and sounds best. Each of the seven Netherworld realms has its own distinct theme, each surreal, artsy personifications of the various age-old perceptions of the afterlife -- most of them more purgatorial than nirvanish. The folk are equally imaginative and well-designed, representing their environments fittingly.

The game does have its share of weaknesseses, however. Load times between gameplay and the all too frequent graphic novelisms and cutscene are laborious, for one. Too, saving your progress can only be done at specific locations at specific times (followed by more load time waits). This wouldn’t be so bad if health were easier to come by, but "life drops" are rare and usually insufficient, so expect to die often, especially in boss battles, and start over from some save point from a ways back.

Regardless of its annoyances, Folklore is worth checking out for its artistic merits alone. Fantasy geeks will likely appreciate the addition downloadable content, including custom made/shared crawlable dungeons, while those looking for a fresh take on adventure/action/soul-suck gameplay in general, replete with an intriguing -- albeit convoluted -- story, could do far worse than Folklore.