It's visually quite stunning and features a solid but overplayed soundtrack. Now and then something will hit just right and you’ll see the potential that's there. Spirit of the North’s inability to nail down even its extremely limited gameplay means that it's a pretty constant frustration. This is a genre known for minimal gameplay, and maximum experience. Spirit of the North positions itself as a title similar to Journey, Abzu, or Rime, but it stumbles at the most basic levels of its gameplay. Although I’d pin that less on the composition itself and more on its implementation. It certainly doesn’t have the emotional impact of the soundtracks of many other games in this genre. While the music is good, it repeats constantly and doesn’t seem particularly situational. The music is similarly high quality, though it perhaps suffers being played too often. Getting to a new area and taking in your surroundings is one of Spirit of the North's stronger elements. While the Switch version runs at a significantly lower resolution than other versions, its visual identity is well maintained. The whole thing looks like an attempt to make an entire game out of Unreal Engine demos, and I don’t mean this in a bad way. On the visual front, Spirit of the North makes the jump to Switch quite well. At best, they slow the player down and pad out the experience. These are systems that are in place to limit the player but don’t seem to be integrated into the actual game design in any real way. As alluded to earlier, the same goes for stamina, where at no point does the game challenge you not to run out. Were you to have infinite use of your abilities it wouldn’t affect any of the puzzles, it would just improve the pace of the game. What's frustrating is that much like the stamina system, no element of the game design really relies on you managing your charge. Add to this that the animation for the flowers releasing energy is painfully slow, and you have a recipe for a monotonous trudge. To do this you’ll have to make continual journeys back to the flowers to recharge. However, oftentimes these puzzles will require you to use up your charge multiple times. The abilities themselves are interesting and are leveraged into a huge variety of different puzzles. This applies to pretty much every task in the game: imbuing energy into stone obelisks, dispelling evil growths, and activating portals, to name a few. You can harvest a single charge from these flowers which will then be used up by whatever ability you activate. All of the abilities are built around the concept of first pulling energy from blue flowers that you’ll find scattered across the world. At the start, the fox is limited to running and jumping, but as the story progresses new powers are unlocked. Much of the gameplay is built around solving puzzles. What I’d quickly find is that this was just the first of multiple functions built on limitations that don’t serve the game design. There is a run button, but it draws from a limited (and not visually represented) pool of stamina that must recharge between uses. This is made worse by how incredibly slow the fox is. In early chapters I’d often walk to the extreme edge of the map hoping to find something, but would inevitably return a little disappointed. While the areas are often huge, the area you’ll actually need to solve puzzles in and explore is generally quite small. Each one sporting a large detailed environment that must be worked through. What follows is a series of linear chapters. After a fall leaves your fox wounded, the two join together to continue their quest. Early in the fox’s adventure, it encounters the spirit of another fox. Spirit of the North follows a fox on a journey towards the origin of a mysterious red cloud that snakes its way across the sky.
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