Product Info

Platform

Switch, PlayStation 4, PC

Publisher

Prideful Sloth

Developer

Prideful Sloth

Genre

Adventure, RPG, Simulation

Players

1

File Size (Minimum)

4.1 GB

Release Date (NA)

Jul 18, 2017

Purchase From

eShop

PSN Store

Steam

In a world full of shooters and weapon-swinging heroes, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles mellows things out with a passive, yet beautiful, adventure full of welcome familiarity.

Into the Wild, New Yonder

In Yonder, you play a nameless protagonist who is traveling to their home island, Gemea. Along the way, you get shipwrecked in a storm, ultimately leaving everyone aboard washed ashore and separated. Afterward, you learn a mysterious, purple mist called Murk has overtaken parts of the land, and it is your job to clear it away.

To do this, you must hunt down and befriend creatures known as Sprites. These fairies are hidden all around Gemea and are acquirable through certain quests or just by discovering them in the wild. The more sprites you have, the larger the sections of Murk you are able to clear away.

Aside from your initial interaction with each Sprite, they otherwise are just useful collectibles. One always accompanies you, behaving like a companion, but interchanging sprites makes no difference to your adventure.

New Adventure, Familiar Heart

After the introduction and a few, brief quests, the adventure is wide open for you to do as you please. Much of your first encounters and cut scenes on Gemea are reminiscent of its inspirations, such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. (There is even an astonishingly similar opening as you emerge from a cave and get your first cliffside view of Gemea.)

As you roam the land, you come across many different flora, most of which you can harvest. You can cut down trees into collectible wood, chop patches of grass, or plant seeds for new trees to grow, which will sprout as you play and flourish later on during your game. That way, you can always come back and cut down more without having to fear deforestation, which adds to the game’s tangible personality.

What is interesting is your tools, how they are acquired, and mostly how they are used. While this game offers physical inspiration from Zelda titles like Breath of the Wild and Wind Waker, it derives most of its mechanical inspiration from passive games such as Harvest Moon.

Tools can only be used when you are beside an object or area they are made for. For example, the fishing pole can only be taken out and cast when standing in front of a body of water. The same goes for items like the axe and scythe, where you never have the freedom to wield them wildly wherever you please, but instead only when next to the foliage they are meant to cut down.

But many materials can’t be harvested from the get-go since you are not equipped with all your tools right away. Many of your tools will be found on quests, some of which you are led to and others you must seek out on your own. Thankfully, most players should discover these quests pretty early on, letting you thoroughly farm sooner rather than later.

Time to Grind

Once you have all your tools, much of your exploration is densely combined with harvesting almost everything you come across. With your materials, you can craft new, useful items using a crafting system reminiscent of recent tiles like Dragon Quest Builders. Crafting brings items that will help you build on Gemea, as well as complete quests along the way.

Some quests are simple, such as building a new bridge for better routes over rivers and trenches, while others are more social where you assist villagers with tasks or find missing pets for people. However, most can be categorized as fetch quests where you simply must find certain amounts of specific materials and bring them back to further the mission.

While some of these fetch quests are enjoyable and help develop your skills in crafting new, bigger materials, many can wear away at the enjoyment of exploring Gemea as time goes on.

That Peaceful Country Life

While grinding for materials to complete building quests can be tough, the task that calls for the most extensive amount of farming is, well, actually farming. You can feed animals to befriend them, as well as guide them to a petite, fenced-in plot of farmland. From there, you build them pens, troughs, and other items necessary for their captivity.

Your farm has a rating system, too, based on traits of your land such as cleanliness and even profitability, so it’s good to return once in a while to tidy up and maintain it. Profits come from materials produced on your farm, such as milk. These collectibles can be used for furthering your crafting or trading at markets for extra materials you may otherwise have a hard time finding on your own.

Secrets and Spoils

What adds a speck of wonder and charm to Yonder are its secrets. A mystical, god-like entity guides you on your quest, hidden stone heads reveal portals to other areas of Gemea, and one town even celebrates Halloween during the Yonder’s in-game autumn season — and you can go trick-or-treating!

Unfortunately, not everything in Gemea is perfect. A drop in frame rate and graphical quality in handheld mode compared to the clean, shimmering TV mode may disappoint some, but the game is by no means unplayable. The changes are minuscule, but it will be a noticeable difference for the more technical gamers out there.

Controls and physics can sometimes prove frustrating, too. In tight spaces and on cliffs, turning can feel a little wide, reminiscent of the jarring movements in N64-era titles like Super Mario 64. Also, learning the physics is rough at first, considering your protagonist cannot swim nor fall long distances, neither of which is ever explained to you. Thankfully, an umbrella catches your fall, but your descent will be dreadfully sluggish. As for the swimming, any step into deep water will simply respawn you at the last surface you were standing on. It is a fun fact, though, that some areas are accessible yet not meant for you to find, and if you happen to fall into water from one, you will respawn elsewhere. Some of these “out-of-bounds” areas even have goofy, hidden messages!

A Quest All Your Own

What’s brilliant is any explorer in Gemea can simply choose to farm, complete quests, seek sprites to defeat the Murk, or all of the above! Though it has its flaws, Yonder blossoms wonderfully through its blend of familiar visuals and mechanics most gamers have already come to love, and then opens its world even more for players of different tastes to get comfortable and play how they want. This is definitely one cloud worth catching.

Disclaimer: A digital review copy was provided by Stride PR.