A colourful adventure that borrows features from many games to create something unique.
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Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles (try saying that ten times in quick succession) appears to be the perfect game to enjoy sitting on your couch on a late summer’s evening. It starts with a journey, one that’s interrupted by a violent storm. After losing our ship we’re on land and facing a striking and strange-looking character. They would like to take a peek at our compass and dutifully we produce it from our pocket. The character seems pleased and the next moment we found ourselves next to our wrecked ship on the shore of a land called Gamea, a place ripe for exploration.
Prideful Sloth is the name of the studio behind this game, and it’s made up of people with experience from the likes of Activision and Rocksteady, and for Yonder they’ve taken inspiration from a wealth of other games and combined them into something unique and beautiful. It’s difficult to pin the game to any one particular genre as it’s many things at once. It offers a world that you can explore and take advantage of in any way you want. The question is how much substance there is beneath this freedom.
As we make our way out of a cave to begin our adventures in Gamea we’re immediately taken aback by the gorgeous world. It’s abstract and colourful. The green grass waves in the wind and the turquoise sky with its fluffy white clouds is jaw-droppingly nice. This is a place where we want to live. This is a place where we want to experience adventures.
It doesn’t take more than a few minutes to amass enough quests and objectives to complete to make our heads spin. Where to start? We meet some of the natives, they’re nice enough and seem keen to equip us with various tools to help with several different tasks such as restoring the east docks, setting up a farm, and catching some fish. Elsewhere sections of the world are sealed off by a purple haze called “murk”. In order to pass through and explore new areas we need to collect sprites that clear the murk for us. Different sections require different numbers of sprites to access, and so collecting these is key to progress.
The concept of Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles reminds us of the brilliant Stardew Valley; with the tools at our disposal we can chop wood, mine rocks, or cut grass, in order to then use the materials acquired to complete objectives. Further into the game it gets more complex and you have to construct things using the deep crafting system or trade with the natives to acquire items. The trade system is unnecessarily cumbersome and at first very difficult to grasp. Different regions value goods differently, which means that rocks can be very valuable in one region and worth next to nothing in another. It makes it hard to part with things you don’t really need as you may not be completely clear on where the best deal can be struck.
There is plenty to do here. Build a farm and focus on growing produce, go fishing, or head out to explore the wider world. With the press of a button the compass pops up along with all the current tasks you’ve started on. Gamea is a large place and it contains eight distinct environments, from dense forests to tropical beaches. Something that’s different with Yonder is that there aren’t any enemies and no way to take damage (apart from walking into the ocean). This means a complete lack of combat encounters, and the closest you’ll get to any sort of conflict is clearing the murk with sprites, but that’s really rather peaceful too.
Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is truly gorgeous to look at. The pastel coloured world is most inviting, and from a technical perspective, it deserves praise, certainly when it comes to the graphics. The other side of that coin is that we’ve encountered some rather pesky bugs during our time with the game, some severe enough to force us to abandon our save file and start anew. These issues may very well be sorted with a future patch, but having to replay the game from the start after having sunk in a good number of hours is never pleasant.
Prideful Sloth has painted a wonderful world full of adventure and things to find (there’s a bunch of cats to look for, to name one thing), but unfortunately, there’s not quite enough substance beyond that to hold our interest over an extended period of time. A more fleshed out narrative would have been a welcome addition, and we would have also liked to have seen more accessible menus and streamlined systems for crafting and trading. It’s a beautiful and relaxing experience, but it lacks the same kind of sense of urgency and reward that makes Stardew Valley so great. If, however, you’re a fairly carefree gamer who enjoys nothing more than wandering around a beautiful setting and busying yourself with little jobs here and there, then perhaps this will be to your tastes.
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Keyword: Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles