Yonder The Cloud Catcher Chronicles

By: ThunderheavyarmA new game from a new publisher as well, Prideful Sloth. A strange mash up of Minecraft style material farming and Stardew Valley actual farming. Your character returns to a dark and mysterious island covered in dark clouds called Murk. Here to discover the mystery of what happened, you must explore the island and please the inhabitants in order to bring happiness to the island once again.I really wanted to like this game just from the description. As it felt like it took the good concepts of both games and combined them. At first, the character design threw me since I wasn’t expecting such a child like looking game. But in general, I don’t judge games by their looks, my focus is gameplay. My concerns started to pile up though near the beginning. The game requires the player to locate fairies so they can remove the murk from areas around the map. Each location is different and requires a different number of fairies. Sounds straight forward right? Surely there’s an indicator on the map of where they would be or a quest that takes you to them? Nope, from my initial gameplay I stumbled across three by pure accident. One of which was part of another quest that gave no indication of how to find it.Moving on, the game gets far more complex for an E game. It starts out fairly simple with the recipes. Find a few of one thing, make this thing. It quickly gets out of control in the next play area with construction quests requiring multiple sources of materials and no easy way to acquire them. For instance, one of the items required me to make nails, and to do this I needed to find 2 iron ore. While this sounds easy, it’s where the true farming aspect of the game comes in. Unlike in games like Minecraft where you can easily tell what you’re mining from the ground, this game gives no indication of what you’ll get. Nails were also the easiest item to collect from the list which just made me rage quit hard for a few days.Finally, the concept of farming. I went into this game expecting to be able to build a farm and just to enjoy the art of agriculture. But even that was stolen from me. The whole point of the farms seems to be, create a small zoo of animals that don’t create meat. I think this had to be the most disappointing aspect of the game for me, and was the final nail. The a game where farming is advertised and you have a multitude of seeds, what’s the point of having farms? It was a little after this revelation that I turned off the game and didn’t look back.I was really disappointed. The game had what looked like incredible potential to find a way to combine two solid games. But in the end it seemed like the creator grabbed not just the worst aspects of two games, but five similar titles. In some weird effort to Frankenstein a game together, instead what we got is a game with a high complexity curve, no indication of where to find items you need to advance and a farming simulator without...well, anything that resembles true farming. The hardest problem is trying to tell you who this game is for, and for the life of me I can’t really tell. I recommend the developer takes this game back to the drawing board and try again. There’s a real diamond in the rough here, it just needs a bit more work to get it out.[yasr_multiset setid=2]