Isle Of Spirits Reviews

**OK, so I played for about 35 minutes, so I can't really comment on the long-tail of the game, but I can give some notes. That also goes without saying that maybe this suddenly changes and blossoms into an amazing game at some point, but I don't see evidence of that and from what I've played, I don't think it's likely. ** This looks & feels like someone's first game, so I don't want to be too hard on anyone, I'll do my best to phrase this as constructively as I can, but if anything comes across as mean/sarcastic, please know it's not meant that way. If I'd come across this on itchio for free and saw it was the dev's first game, I'd be pleasantly surprised. The basic mechanics work(outside a confusing cooking mini-game), there's something of a core loop, there's a vague goal. It's all more or less passable, for a free game. The look of things are off though, the sort of soft 3D-chibi protagonist doesn't belong in the blocky world, and the blocky world implies the ability to deform the terrain(since that's the entire point of building a big world out of cubes) but I could not figure out any way to do so, and it appears there just isn't a way to deform the world. The game is advertised as having sort of weather events and tornadoes and things like that. It's possible I didn't play long enough but outside of a sort of rumbling earthquake (I 100% thought it was just a camera glitch) I didn't encounter anything like significant weather. I did encounter what seem to be the titular spirits, but the encounter was simply that I took damage if I let my torch go out. The actual game-play loop is dictated by your stat-meters. Eat, sleep, drink, pretty standard stuff. It works, but unfortunately the resource collection to keep these bars full is about as simple as it gets. Hold E to cut the tree, tap E to gather wood, tap E to gather grass, tap E to gather apples, tap E to gather loose stones, Hold E to mine stones from an outcrop. There's nothing endangering you or giving you a tangible sense of progression or satisfaction. Many games are saved from boring mechanics by a story or world that engages the player, but the world here is entirely free of context, character, narrative, or anything else to elevate the mechanics. This is, to me at least, a good example of where publishing as a "Hey this is my first game, check it out!" on itchio or newgrounds or something would have improved the experience. However, coming across this on Steam for $14.99 is setting up a comparison to other games in the same price range and Genre (Terraria, Raft, The Forest, The Isle are all within $5 of the current price) which leaves this feeling like a loss. I feel it is absolutely not worth the asking price in it's current state. I hope the dev takes something helpful away from this, and continues to make new and better games than this.