Yonder Game Review

Today it seems that the industry is focused heavily on the concept that what we all want out of a single player experience is a huge open world to explore. Thus the market is flooded with big budget open world experiences. Most of your indie titles are the ones filling the niche for us old school gamers who like open world games for sure but also long for something a little more retro in scope and presentation. Do not mistake me, I love Breath of the Wild, and games like it. My point is this most big games come from big companies and most small games from smaller ones. But not this one. Yonder is different in a lot of respects from both.

You play as a player created avatar who is returning to your childhood home on a ship using a compass given to you as a child. The only other thing you have to go is a vague letter from your parents. That came with the compass. You were sent away from your home as a child for mysterious reasons and now it is time for you to return home. Of course this is easier said than done and the ship you are on crashes on the shores of your home long lost. At the moment of your ships demise you have a vision from a mysterious creature who gives you some insight on how to process and then you emerge from a cave on a ridge to an open field. That is the premise in a nutshell, and while it may not be anything mindbogglingly original, it is still fairly effective. The story is not the main focus of this game and as such it is scaled small as to not interfere with the players own chosen progression. There is a threat to this world in the form of the murk, which is poisoning the world, or so the game says. Mainly it is used as a tool to halt the players progress until he has the maguffins to move it. All in all though the story is what you make of it.

The visual style feels very inspired by The Legend of Zelda, particularly Windwaker. The land you emerge onto reminded me a lot of Breath of the Wild at first. However, the more I explored the more the land took on its own identity. Everything is extremely cute and chunky. All the colors of the game are incredible and the seasons change quickly giving the game a different presentation so that as you walk the same path it will look slightly different. Other influences to the game are Harvest Moon and Animal crossing. Despite so many inspirations the game blends these elements well and it all feels very seamless. There is a sense of wonder to everything you encounter and a certain mystery to the game particularly at night. Several times I have found things that even now I do not know what they are. It gives the world a sense of mystery and scale beyond its own actual size.

As far as the music, this game is very easy on the ears. It reminds me of the sort of ambient stuff you listen to while you sleep and it makes it very easy to relax to and wind down after a long day. Most of the other sound is animals making noises or grunts and text sound from NPC's. Fanfares for accomplishments are satisfying the game places certain mysterious sounds in places to enhance the sense of unknown at key moments and locations. Already I feel I have run out of things to say in the sound department. So I'll end by saying it fits the games aesthetic well.

The control of your character is floaty and at times unprecise. But precision is rarely required as the game is not asking you to do combat of any kind. Crafting is easy with only a few menu options and buttons to sort through everything the game has to offer. Fishing controls feel great and most of the other mini game like interactions are programmed well. Most issues I had playing the game were not related to the control itself but the environment.

Which brings me neatly to the overall world design. I like the way it looks and the sense of exploration it presents. But often I find the design of the environment to hamper exploration. At one point I was walking up a hill and thought that I had hit an invisible wall, no I was just up against the side of the road and had to jump to get unstuck. There are a lot of mountains and paths, but traversing them is problematic as there is not way to scale vertical obstacles. This means you will often find yourself running all the way around your objective trying to find an approach. Water is another major obstacle as swimming is impossible and the game asks you to build you own bridges. This encourages crafting yes, but some of the bridges are left me farming for rocks and sticks for hours and growing more trees than plants just for the wood. It began to feel tedious to go around rivers that I could not get the materials to build a bridge for. Finding all the guilds is fairly easy and learning their recipes requires usually only a quick trip around the town in question. There are hundreds of other quests in the game as well and most of them involve a quirky NPC. These characters begin to all look the same after a while but it is barely noticeable. Also, fast travel is accomplished by unlocking statues that can carry you from region to region. These statues are certainly helpful and fun to find. There are also other shrines you can use that open based on time of day or night, but I only used them once. Most of what you will do in this game is craft, farm, explore, fulfill quests and clear murk. Murk is cleared by having enough sprites. These are found fairly easily just by again exploring around. In the end I spent the most time wandering through Yonder looking for objectives and filling them out as I went. To help you are given an easy to read map that you fill out eventually. Initially though you will rely on your compass to literally point you where you need to go.

I liked this game even more than I thought I would. It genuinely felt like an open world Harvest Moon and those games seem the most applicable to compare it to. The NPC's are colorful and fun to help, but they lack the depth of other games because of the size of the world. The size means their needs to be a lot of them. The amount leads to shallower interactions with most of them. The farms are fun to build and maintain, and you can automate them completely with hired farm hands. I like just wondering around and seeing what I can find. Traversing the world could be easier, but I understand the reason for it being done this way. They were not out to make Breath of the Wild 2, but their own thing. The only changes I would make would be to make the Mirk more meaningful. As is all the do is halt progress, yet the game tells you people are dyeing and sick because of it. Here is what I would do, make some of the NPC's sick from the Murk and give them all different reactions to it. Then add a pharmacist or compounder class to the game to master. The player could then see the threat of the murk without the developers having to change much of the world design or progression. It would be up to the player to learn the class and heal those who are sick and potions could be used to heal those who are sick with other side effects for mastering these potions such as fast travel or fast movement. It makes the Murk more than an obstacle and gives another craft to master. That said, none of the above criticism is a deal breaker for me and I found myself sinking a lot of time into this title. I would love to see it get a sequel and improve upon what seems to me to be a firm foundation. If you are looking for a stress free title to sink into and relax, this is the game for you.