izigame.me

This is a preliminary review as I did not finish the game yet, but I have done most of the first big area (the raven clan).
What I can already say is that I am very split on two distinct points:

Gameplay and game design

The gameplay and game design itself is great so far.
The new approach with a more open world to explore and uncover lore and solve puzzles is nicely made.
I will go more into detail once I have finished the game!

Technical side (performance / graphics fidelity)

The technical side, specifically the performance and image quality of this game is.... abysmal, especially compared to the first title. (I'm not talking about the details of assets/textures, mind you! It is specific to the rendering pipeline that produces the final images.)
For a simple benchmark and comparison to the first game:
My rig is currently running an i7-14700k, an RTX4070 Ti Super, and 64GB of RAM.
The first game is normally locked to 60 FPS, but can be easily unlocked for unlimited FPS, which I have done for this comparison.
Spirit of the North 1
Max Settings (Ultra) @ 1440p native
Runs at 220 FPS (!), well over my monitors refresh rate.
Game still look gorgeous, and is IMHO comparable with SOTN 2 on Medium settings.
Buttery smooth camera panning, crisp motion clarity, very low input lag, no image blur or ghosting artifacts, fur detail is very good with no visible graphics issues (although a bit "wobbly" in the wind).
No further tweaks of settings needed to get the best experience.
Spirit of the North 2
Medium(!) settings @ 1440p native (100% resolution scale)
Runs at 55 FPS, measly by comparison
Acceptable framerate, but far off from my monitors refreshrate of 144Hz.
Mandatory Temporal Anti-Aliasing causes ghosting artifacts that are perceptible around your character and other moving objects. Motion clarity is impacted while turning the camera, washing out details noticeably during movement, and then reappearing only after a slight delay, making for a somewhat jarring experience.
Fur rendering is bad, especially on Medium and lower settings, showing "holes" of black shine-through of the character model, depending on the view angle.
Global illumination on medium settings causes very noisy light shimmering in dark spots with few light sources.
Input lag without the bandaid that is NVIDIA Reflex is a bit worse than in SOTN 1.
If you're susceptible to one or more of these issues (like me) it makes for an objectively worse experience than SOTN 1, even with comparable graphics by lowering down the settings.
The Culprit
What exactly happened?
Well, Unreal Engine 5 happened.
It is no secret that Unreal Engine 5 almost always produces heavy to run games, even when creating them with comparable graphics to, say, an Unreal Engine 4 game (like SOTN 1 is).
The crux with the new engine is that in theory it can produce better effects and lighting, but at an immense cost of GPU power. And the underlying rendering pipeline is built from the ground up with these effect in mind, like Global Illumination or Nanite etc. Even when you are not using these "modern" features, TAA is still basically the default with all of it's trade-offs, other AAs that do not produce the blur or ghosting downsides are flat out not easily possible anymore.
To "fix" the high performance cost of these "modern" features, one of two band-aid solutions are needed: Either turn down rander scale (in SOTN2 it's only 50% by default!) OR use an upscaler like DLSS.
And even then, we are getting nowhere near the FPS of older titles not relying on RT/Global Illumination, while still looking AND running great.
Often times pre-baked lighting actually looks a lot better for large static open-world games with so much less runtime overhead, and I'd argue that most games don't even need full global illumination. It could just be used in a few otherwise tricky or dynamic places where it makes sense.
Sadly with the mass adoption of UE5 these "modern" features are here to stay.
As someone who has played many many games released from the 1990s all the way to now, this new trend on solely relying on a single engine with all it's shortcomings is worrying. Every game starts to look and perform the same.
Sure, new devs will have an easier time developing games with UE5 since it's become the defacto standard, but at what cost? Will there ever be well performing optimized games with sharp image clarity again without these issues, other than small indie passion projects?

I don't really know where I'm going with this, other than to rant-vent I guess.
I've spent half an hour tweaking the settings in this game, to gain a somewhat playable framerate of ~60-80 FPS and am still a little unsatisfied, even though the game itself is great.
I launched the old game as well for direct comparison, and I cannot help but weep a little tear, for all the image quality and performance we have lost, all the while GPUs are getting more and more wildly expensive delivering less and less relative performance.