In short: 9 out of 10
Pros: Beautiful graphics, ability to posses different animals, good-written story, fine soundtrack
Cons: Glitches, not great optimization for PC (mine is ultrabook with intel hd), at chapters 1-3 (out of 7) it's hard to find where to go.
So: if you love animals and walking simulators — then grab it right now!
Maaayyybe with some discount (fully worth price of pre-order — 20$, but not worth full 30$ in current state).
Overall I enjoyed this game :)
In breif: I was tempted to stop playing due the the technical problems with the game, but kept going for the story. In the end, I do not feel the story is good enough to make up for the technical issues.
In Detail:
The story is okay, but not stellar. I felt it was difficult to get into the story for the first half of the game. However, I was more drawn in the latter half. All the same, I did not feel a strong emotional response to the story as I have for games like the First Tree or Gris. I did not feel satisfied with the end of the story once I finished the game, but I won't spoil what happens.
The gameplay was pretty irritating, with the animals getting stuck in places more than I would have liked, necessitating some resets. Once I clipped through the ground in a spot and ended up falling and dying repeatedly. It's often difficult to know where you are going and invisible walls often block your way. If you fall from a ledge you will reset back to where you fell, even if the fall is not very far. The result is that it is difficult to know where you can and cannot go.
Visually, the game did not look polished. For example, animals would sometimes appear to float a little above the ground. The water splashes looked like a bunch of little fuzzy particles. The camera would also clip through objects frequently.
I am not one for walking simulators usually, but I love myself a short linear game if it has a nice story, and I love the feeling of flow that games like, for example, Flower can give the player.
This one indeed has very discrete portions that flow smoothly, but they are:
1. Boring as hell, despite the diversity of environments
2. Continuously broken by the mechanic of soul shifting that requires you to pass from a fast-moving wolf to a falling bird or a terribly slow mole or another mammal.
The story is also incredibly cliché, and I would like to tell the developers that you cannot build up to a character-based plot twist when there are only 3 characters interacting in the blandest of ways and also that world-building should happen before using the world feature as a plot point.
If I were to guess, I would say the devs stopped caring midway and "had" to develop the rest of the game because of the pledges on Kickstarter.
The story is mediocre, just some well known motives and cliches cobbled together.
Every action on the player's side is basically pointless. You just walk along the most obvious path and press additional buttons when the game tells you to. There are hundreds of collectables, but their descriptions are barely interesting and finding them does not lead you to cool places. So collecting them is just busywork. In the few situations where it is not obvious what to do, the solution is to find the invisible hole in the invisible walls that are everywhere around you.
These walls also prevent you from enjoying the graphics of the game most of the time. You cannot go where you want and the inclusion of Nvidia Ansel is useless as the invisible walls prevent you from significantly changing the perspective. Additionally, the viewing-distance is often disappointing and there is a lot of stuff only popping up when you are already very close.
The developers have clearly worked hard on this game and I do not regret spending money on it. I just wish that they come up with some original story ideas for their next game or omit the story and focus on a more open world where proper exploring is possible.
In summary, this game is boring, unless you enjoy pressing down the "w" key for a few hours, interrupted by fragments of an uninspired story.
First thing that you notice - are the in-game colorful beauties of nature, followed by the music. Second is the storyline - at the beginning, a pretty insteresting story as you just start to discover everything. But be aware, the story later starts to turn into a emotional rollercoaster with a pretty satisfying ending to me. Third, the animals - it takes a few seconds to catch up with the controls of certain animals, but after that you enjoy every run, flight or dive with a good choice of wonderful animals.
Overall - there is a lot of pretty nature to explore thru this decent storyline, with some fun collectibles along the way. At certain points, I feel like the storyline could be a little more better. The running around the map is also a bit tiring in certain parts of the story. My personal best in the game - pretty nature and animals, I didn't find the storyline too interesting.
If you love running and exploring pretty nature and animals with a simpe storyline, this game is for you.
