This year it's the turn of PC gamers to enjoy this "open world social indie adventure game ". I guess XBox users will have to wait until 2024.
Anyway, it's been out for long enough that anyone who wants to know what it's about can find all the information they need easily enough. There's a lengthy Wikipedia entry and Metacritic (Where the game scores a healthy 82 from critics although only a mediocre 7.4 from players.) has links to more than enough reviews for anyone.
Even so, I might still have added my opinion to the pile if I thought I had anything of value to contribute but I don't. I played for forty-nine minutes and for the whole time I was there I never really understood what I was doing or cared very much about finding out.
The graphics are very pretty. On the running theme of whether these demos look better in game or in screenshots I'd have to say Sky looks equally impressive in both. I certainly enjoyed looking at the expressionistic scenery, although it felt more like wandering through the Rothko room at Tate Modern than travelling through an actual landscape.
There's some kind of storyline or narrative but it mostly washed over me along with all the pastels. There were stars and constellations and elders and spirits and lot of similar new age tropes. It was like being back in the early 'nineties (Which, of course, was like being back in the mid-sixties.)
The mechanics were straightforward enough although I didn't find the controls entirely comfortable. Again with "E" for Use Object? What's wrong with "F"? My index finger drifts across to F a lot more naturally than it stretches up to E but maybe that's just me.
Movement was okay but not as smooth as I'd expected. There's a common practice of game designers that I don't much like; using movement as a form of progression. It's off-putting to have to do everything clumsily and awkwardly just because you're new. I mean, it may be more realistic but what does realism have to do with any of this?
Again, I wasn't paying the instructions as much attention as I should have been but I'm fairly sure there was some kind of progression tied to flight, which is a key feature of the game. I remember my wings levelling up a couple of times and there was an energy mechanic I never understood. I'm very much of the school that believes if you can fly in a game you should just be able to darn well fly!
The subtleties of movement were just one of the things I never got to grips with. Mostly I just brute-forced my way around, hammering the Space key repeatedly to jump over small obstacles on the ground and veering from side-to side as I leaned hard on the "A" and "D" keys in flight.
Other than my issues getting from one place to another and not really following the plot, I didn't figure out how to use the shops or the "Shared Space", which seemed to be a form of housing. I failed to save my work there, somehow, so all my decorations whipped back into my inventory when I left.
A big part of the game is communicating non-verbally with other players but I had a certain amount of trouble working out who were players and who were NPCs. I did eventually manage to swap candles with someone or whatever it is you do but I had no idea what it meant. It certainly didn't create any feelings of togetherness, just a sense of mild confusion.
Above all, while playing both games I found myself thinking "Why am I doing this?" Neither of them were sufficiently tactile to be fun to play for the sheer exhillaration of the experience; neither had a compelling storyline; both had mechanics that felt awkward and repetitive.
I realise I've played a lot of games over the years and enjoyed many a lot more than this, even though they were objectively much worse. I do wonder sometimes if perhaps I'm just beginning to experience a kind of gamer's ennui. There might be only so many times you can go to the well and hope to draw fresh water.
Then again, I didn't have the same concerns in any of the other demos this time around so perhaps it's just that these two games aren't that great. A lot of contributors to this reddit thread seem to think that's true of Sky.
I don't think I'll de-wishlist Sky. It is free to play after all so it's not like there's money to worry about. De-wishlisting seems kind of rude, anyway. I haven't removed Snufkin yet even though I said I was going to. It feels a bit harsh, somehow.
Still, I don't think there's any real chance I'll play either of them again, free or not.
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I thought it was neat. It's very, very similar to Journey (an earlier single-player game by the same devs, if you're not already familiar), and I love Journey.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I do think part of the appeal of Journey is that it's short and sweet (you can finish it in 90 minutes). I'm not sure I feel the need for an extended, persistent world version of the experience. So I'm not sure I'm going to spend a lot of time on Sky, even if I appreciate what it's trying to do.
As an aside, I first learned of Sky through its collaboration with the singer Aurora, of whom I am a fan, and man do I now get why they reached out to her (or maybe the other way around, I suppose). This feels like almost exactly what would happen if you somehow magically transformed Aurora's music into a video game.
I noticed quite a few of the mildly negative reviews and comments I read were from people who said they'd enjoyed Journey and as far as I could see their main issue with Sky was the same as yours, namely that an extended, persistent version of the same experience doesn't really expand it so much as turn it into a never-ending grind.
DeleteI think my response would certainly have been different if I'd thought "This is a finite experience that's going to take me at most a few hours". It was the understanding that it was the beginning of a journey to a never-ending end-game that made me wonder what the point of it all was.
It is lovely to look at but even then it's a bit bland for my taste. And while the underlying message is undeniable positive, the trappings it's dressed in dosmack quite strongly of the kind of books we shelve in "Personal Development", the section that used to be called "Mind Body and Spirit". Really not my sort of thing at all. It's a big market, though, no denying that.