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A nice audio/visual experience in the vein of Flower and Journey.
What you are in for:
This is a simple, flowing, platformer that has you going through distinct stages to heal the land. On your way to reach the end of each level you collect spirit animals and memory fragments along the way. The spirit animals will show up in the world as soon as you collect them, and also show up back at your sort of home base. The memory fragments give a comic image that tells a story pertaining to the environment in some way once you collect them all. Progress is non linear you can choose which stage you want to do next. Each stage has some sort of gimmick which allows you to interact with things in a new way to traverse or solve light puzzles. There is combat but its pretty light and overall the game isn't too demanding.
Music is really nice, visuals are obviously gorgeous and generally feels nice to run around the world as the character is well animated and movement (mostly) feels nice.
I think they accomplished a lot with what is ultimately little in the way of gameplay and remained an enjoyable journey, I missed a few animals/ memories so you can tack on a little extra time onto my playtime if you are going for 100%.
I do think it could have leaned a little more into the gameplay mechanics side however.
There are a couple of things that really serve no purpose mechanically; there are many spots you can find that let you grow a tree or a plant of some kind by using the purifying wave ability. While this looks nice and is tonally in line with the point of the story, at least as far as I could tell this never means anything in a gameplay sense. Similarly, you can pet or wave to the spirit animals and they will make a noise in turn and light up in a way. Theres even a button dedicated to this, but doesn't seem to do anything mechanically.
Now I'm all for smelling the roses, and I certainly took my time here taking in the sights and taking screenshots. But this is an area that I feel by putting a mechanical incentive onto things it would also strengthen them on a narrative level. There is no HP bar, and dying always puts you nearby. Imagine instead if the trees you grew with the purifying ability acted as respawn points, and finding and interacting with animals healed you, or lessened some sort of corruption build up meter or something.
Some other various nitpicks:
the movement could use some tweaks, some speeds feel off, there are momentum losses that dont feel good like on the double jump, gliding feels oddly short/weak.
There are NO keyboard/mouse controls, straight up none. I came to accept this, I'm not a diehard kbm user, I think it and gamepad are equally valid and every pc gamer should have a gamepad on them. That said, an odd omission.
No rebinding, sprint is on R2 and you are going to use this a LOT. I would prefer it on R1 since holding a DS4 trigger that long flares up some wrist pain for me. Thankfully steam controller rebinding exists.
60 fps lock, though apparently you can change this in an ini, I didn't try it however.
No photo mode ( really guys? the game looks so nice, a photo mode is literally free marketing )
There is some "Garden" feature/mode after beating the game, seems to require an internet connection. This didn't seem to work for me, I have no idea what it is.
Closing notes:
Overall I really enjoyed it. But you have to be interested in the visuals on offer, and be willing to just take in the vibes on an otherwise light gameplay platform. For most I would probably pick up on a sale, its sort of a one and done game. If you are someone who wants more on a mechanical level, Alice Madness Returns might be more fitting. Some reason I was reminded of that playing this, maybe its just the nice hair physics.
Anyway, I look forward to the devs next work. Especially since ThatGameCompany kinda fell off as of late. This sub genre is always relaxing and a nice sort of palette cleanser between bigger games.