Winds of Viridia is built around a traversal system that reads as seamless, and the word is doing real work - there are no mode switches between walking, sliding and climbing, and the character flows between them. Getting a handle on it is the difference between exploring the valley and merely walking through it.
Rolling, sliding, flipping and grappling are the four movement primitives, and the game chains them rather than gating them behind separate inputs. A grapple into a wall converts into a slide on landing, a slide into a flip at the right speed, a flip into a long jump. Learning where those conversions trigger is the actual skill, and it is the kind of skill that rewards experimentation in a demo more than it rewards reading a guide.
The valley's flora is interactive. Certain plants respond to your movement and propel you - boosting jumps and launching you into arcs that would otherwise be unreachable. This is what makes the terrain a platforming vocabulary rather than scenery: the glades and grottos are laid out around specific plant interactions, and a route that looks impossible usually has a plant on it that you have not noticed.
Because plants are easy to walk past, a demo play session will almost certainly miss a portion of them. Sweeping the valley deliberately rather than following the obvious route is worth doing before drawing conclusions about how open the game is.
The grapple is the long-distance verb, and it is what connects the vertical layers of the valley. Grapple points are placed to reward chaining - a single grapple rarely gets you where you need to go, but two or three in sequence cover distances that would take a long detour on foot. The grottos in particular are laid out as grapple puzzles.
The valley contains mountain glades, hidden grottos and ancient ruins, and the three are worth approaching differently. Glades are open and serve as orientation points. Grottos are dense, vertical and reward the grapple. Ruins are where the relic material for the Totem system lives, so they are progression-gated rather than optional.
The valley's design is legible in a way that unusual for a game at this stage - the preview coverage and the demo both suggest a coherent spatial structure with clear landmarks, and the Grantree itself is visible from a great many points, which makes navigation intuitive even in an unfamiliar space.