The gameplay is slow but steady as you navigate what seems to be open worlds in a largely linear fashion. The A button lets you yap and bark, which becomes increasingly useful in further chapters to communicate with allied spirits, and finally, the X button interacts with totems and anything else that is usable. Holding L gives you a boost of speed, dashing through the snow twice as fast as your standard amble and the R button lets you jump, so you can bound around the environments reaching higher places and leaping over obstacles. Using the left stick you push forward and your beast lurches into action. You begin in a vast snow-laden tundra, with a sense of awe that lets you feel like you could walk anywhere in this environment, sniff out things in the far reaches, and leisurely advance around the landscapes with such a sense of wonder that absolutely anything could be around the next turn for you to discover. Infuse Studio was formed in 2015 and contains just 3 members who juggle design, music, and various Unreal Engine 4 based techniques required to produce stunning works of evocative art. Spirit of the North is an incredibly simplistic adventure in a similar vein to Rime of Journey, positing a simple, ordinary, common or garden red fox as the main proponent, driving a Nordic folklore laden tale of exploration and intrigue. It can reach for more drama in the few action-led sequences, but largely this is a soundtrack to sooth the senses, rather than assault them.In a culture of complicated games, with hours of gameplay and meta-level puzzles, super minimal games never really get much coverage and even less praise against its rival games, unless it nails several key pillars of gaming and offers something that really distinguishes itself from the pack. It’s suitably tender, thoughtful and playful, and good enough that you might find yourself stop playing just to take a moment and listen. Similarly, the piano-rich soundtrack sets a gentle and mysterious tone. At times the camera pans out to show mountains off in the distance, while the grass waves in the breeze it’s genuinely breathtaking. The sun nestles above the Icelandic-styled mountains, offering a primal landscape for your fox to adventure across, and it’s a beautiful, if simple, place to do so. Your foxy protagonist is a living, yelping, sneezing creature – with glorious fur to boot – who pants when you’ve made them run too far. The main reason to return beyond ticking off the spirit collection, would be to experience the delightful and evocative atmosphere that developer Infuse Studio have cultured. It doesn’t help that Spirit of the North ever so slightly overstays its welcome, dragging things out when you feel as though the tale should be coming to an end. It’s not a complete disaster by any means, but it diminishes the game’s thoughtful outlook, when you may have to take a step away through frustration.Īs you enter the closing sections, the platforming challenges do step up a notch, as do the puzzles, but so much of the difficulty comes back to your fox’s wayward leaping. The times where you’re stuck often aren’t through a lack of understanding what to do, it’s you wrestling with the slightly ungainly controls. While he looks great walking or running down the hillsides, climbing steps or leaping across anything showcases the game’s more humble roots. It’s probably a blessing that there isn’t too much in the way of platforming or puzzle solving, as our reddish-brown pal isn’t all that good at them. It feels a little unfair invoking the spirit of Journey, but there’s some of that explorative, life-affirming adventuring here. There are occasional puzzles, which tends to be a question of activating things in a specific order, and the lightest of running and platforming requirements, but all in all this is more of an experiential piece. Still, it gives you a small amount of drive through your travels, and if you miss some on your first run through, it gives you a reason to return.īarring that notion of resurrecting spirits, Spirit of the North is a relatively frictionless experience. It’s a lot of skeletons, and a lot of corresponding staffs, which seems overly careless to my mind. You’ll find skeletons scattered across the mountainside and the country below, and you can assist them by reuniting them with their staffs. You soon discover the game’s loose task, which is to revive spirits and allowing them to leave this mortal plane.
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