Spirit of the North Game Review – Fox-god adventures in a snowy landscape? Yes please!
Or that’s what I initially thought when I saw the screenshots and trailer.
Boy I was so wrong…
I tried with this game really tried. But I just couldn’t get past how frustratingly repetitive it was.
Plot
You play as a fox who has noticed his world being consumed by some sort of darkness. He goes to investigate and he is gravely injured, saved by the female fox spirit of light. Your job once the spirit of light takes over your body and heals it is to spread the light to different key areas (most noticeably the Northern Lights) and restore light to the world.
Gameplay
The gameplay for Spirit of the North is… repetitive. And not in a good way. In order to “charge” your powers of light you need to find these special flowers and howl at them. This gives you the ability to fill certain objects with said light and thus opening up new areas. It sounds simple and it would be except it’s really not.
The environment is all very “same-y” all the rocks look the same (besides the ones you have to interact with) and all the areas look similar to each other. I cannot say how long I’d be wondering around an area trying to find the way out only to realise that it was an area I’d already been to. Finally I’d get somewhere I’d never been (or so I thought) and it’d be a dead end. Or even worse just a Shaman body. For explanation purposes; there are Shaman bodies dotted all over the world. They can be freed using the power of light but you can’t use the power of light from the flowers or the fox god. You need to first find a special Shaman staff, carry it over to the body and that releases the spirit of the Shaman.
This. Is. So. Frustrating!
The game gives no reason as to why the Shaman staffs are the only things that can release the Shaman spirits. You need to just conclude it’s because they’re Shaman and human and you’re a fox ergo the magic of light is different somehow ??? I really don’t know. There’s zero explanation given to anything. Not even a hint of an explanation.
Some people may like that because it leaves things open to interpretation but quite frankly it’s annoying. So, for reasons unknown. The magic you get from the flowers only works on the magical stones and only works once per stone. So if you find another stone that you know you’ll have to activate to move on, you have to find another unused flower and so on and so forth.
Patience wearing very thin
So, not only do you get lost alot of the time cos everything looks the damn same. But then you have to spend the vast majority of your time going back and forth trying to activate flowers. Remember the ones you’ve used. Find another stone. Activate that…
It just goes on and on…
I haven’t got the most amount of patience at the best of times but this game could make Jesus himself throw his sandals at the screen.
I tried to be patient with it and persevere but it was too much. Turning off the game gave me a strange sense of relief and freedom. I’ve not touched it since, unfortunately.
Review
The most frustrating thing about Spirit of the North is that it isn’t bad per se. It’s not lazily made. You can tell a lot of love and hard work has gone into it but it’s just clunky and poorly executed. I can see what they were trying to do I think but it just doesn’t work.
That’s what’s most annoying. It feels like a missed opportunity.
