I was excited for this release, since I have great memories of the 1st game. Sadly, I can barely say anything positive about this one.

+ The concept/idea behind the game. Foxes + mystic powers + nature.

- Atrocious optimization. Game barely squeezes out 28 FPS, most of the time it's below 25 in-game and 10-16 FPS IN MENU on Medium settings (I have RTX 3060 Ti). And don't get me started on the requirements and recommended specs. There are older games that look better and have way more objects (people, animals, plants, machinery, etc.) and effects (realistic lightning, flowing water, weather changes, etc.) to process, yet their perfomance is superior! SOTN 2 is unplayable; for now, anyway. And the game should not have been released in such a poor state.
- Poor UI/UX design: pressing ESC while in-game will open... fox customization. It should at the very least lead to the settings screen, common sense would be choosing the ESC lead to the pause menu with "continue/load/settings/quit/etc" options, but certainly not character customization. This is the first time for me seeing such a bizarre choice.
- Render issues caused by the absence of checking the camera's position and processing the cases when it gets inside objects. Random polygons from the wall get rendered and the others don't.
- "Target jump" ability. Whenever you want to jump on something, you have to look towards the object until you see a blue arrow, and then you press "Space". Automatic jumping?! This was supposed to be a platformer...
- Clunky controls.
- Fox's cry is creepy and unnatural.

Conclusion: I have no desire to play SOTN 2 for now. Maybe in the future, when it gets patched, I will give it another chance.

I really want to like this game, I loved the first, but I just can't. There were so many little things throughout the game that bothered me, and made it hard to properly enjoy. At this time, unless they update it further with more QoL stuff or puzzles, I don't recommend this unless you have time to kill or the game is on sale. *Warning: Very mild spoilers*

First the positives:
1: The fox was very cute. Floofy tail and customisable body. Much enjoyed.
2: Lots of kind of interesting puzzles that weren't brain dead easy nor stupidly hard. I think the puzzles generally seemed to hit that middle ground sufficiently well. Though tending towards the easy side. Could have maybe done with a bit more variety in puzzle types though.
3: The landscape is very nice. Lots of good views, good landscapes, and interesting ruins/setting backdrops.
4: Movement was *mostly* quite fluid and good. Only type of movement I had issue with was the dash being a bit janky at times, and stuttering forward at the end of the dash weirdly. Also the jumping mechanics could definitely do with some more polish.
5: What lore I could piece together painted an interesting picture of a surprisingly fleshed out world. If you had had a chance to see more of that world, I think that would have been better. I.E interact with alive characters in some form. As it is, literally everyone on the island is dead other than you, a few raccoons, and a few foxes that you only see at the very beginning and then never again. Would have been nice to see some wild deer, rams, etc, based on which region you were in or even for them to appear as the story progressed and you beat the relevant bosses.
6: Music was generally pleasant. Quite funnily, the menu music was definitely my favourite.

Now the issues:
-The first and foremost of these is: They removed the ability to wag your tail. Sadge. Now instead you just bark/cry.
-Second was just how empty the map was. Don't get me wrong, the map was visually appealing, and had multiple different areas with different aesthetics, but travel times between objectives was far too long for how little to do there was in the interim. One of the things you need to do is collect these things called wisps. But you can only have so many at once. So once you have a full stock, there is no point exploring more, because it would serve no purpose. You can store these wisps in your home, but that would involve tons of backtracking to do. Made worse by the fact that you can only mark one thing on the map at any one time. If the map was maybe *half* the size it currently is, this wouldn't nearly be as much of an issue. There is a fast travel system but its more like a series of point that you can travel between, and they aren't actually super obvious to find. The last 2 regions I played through, I fully just didn't find the fast travel point. Which meant, you guessed it, lots more running.
-Third issue is that there are a LOT of parts of the map that you can clip through still. I genuinely think I clipped through the floor at least two dozen times during my playthrough. Lots of walls that aren't actually there, rocks that aren't solid, etc.
-Fourth issue that only really reared its head at the end for me is that the cutscenes at present cannot be skipped. Which is fine if you only need to see them once, but they play every single time you enter a boss arena. The last boss fight cutscene is a full minute long. And the fight itself is a notable step up in difficultly. Meaning I died a lot. Meaning I watched the same minute long cutscene at least a dozen times. Which got QUITE boring by the end.
-Finally, the boss fights themselves just didn't really feel satisfying for me? A lot of them were incredibly easy, albeit kind of repetitive. Which, now that I think about it, could be said to be an unfortunate running theme of the game: repetitiveness. The first boss fight was kind of fun. The second started to lose its charm. The third was alright. The fourth was getting repetitive. The fifth was just disappointing. And the sixth was frustrating. (I will also add on that I was kind of sad that I didn't get any cool reward for beating the game, such as being able to run with northern lights like in the first game.)

***Major Spoilers***
EDIT: I feel I should add on to this bit specifically, about the bosses:
***Major Spoilers***

First Boss - Great fun, interesting use of game mechanics in an fresh way. Using gliding and in game objects to beat the enemy. Interesting arena and fight. In retrospect, probably the best of the boss fights.
Second Boss - Dodge stuff while in a small circle then activate 3 totems. Rather forgettable.
Third Boss - Dodge stuff in a bigger circle then headbutt the boss. I don't know if it was intended but the boss ALWAYS teleported out of my line of sight. Which usually meant right next to me, behind me. Annoying.
Fourth Boss - Dodge TWO things in an average sized circle then headbutt them. Now with jumping included.
Fifth Boss - Do basic platforming three times across lava. Extremely easy and simple for the second last boss.

Sixth Boss (and the one I have the most feelings about) - Cross the arena dodging obstacles and boss fire 6 times, each time with a different set of obstacles that require different game mechanics. Would be alright if not for the boss aim being annoyingly good, annoyingly frequent, and taking two health each attack, which ends up with him potentially combo-ing you to death. It usually took only one mistake for me to lose 80% of my health, with near max health. And each restart then dealing with the 1 minute cutscene. (Also the premise of the boss fight is that 5 spirit animals cannot help the protagonist because a metal grate closed over the door in front of them? One of you can teleport, one can throw around lava, and one of you has WINGS! Fly over! It's an open top arena!)

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME

Why does the specs have to be so high?! Like seriously.

This was supposed to be a chill fun cozy game. I've waited and counted down the days to play this game and when I finally get it, not only does it crash the game like 3 times within 30 minutes of playing it but it also crashed my streaming software and almost crashed my computer!

NEWER GAMES LIKE ES:OBLIVION DOESN'T EVEN NEED NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 / Radeon RX 6800!! ES:OBLIVIOUS MINIMUM IS A AMD Radeon RX 5700, NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti ?!

AND WHY DOES IT NEED AN I7 12TH GEN ONCE AGAIN OBLIVION DOSENT EVEN NEED A 12TH GEN!

LIKE WAS THIS GAME NOT OPTIMIZED PROPERLY?!

I love the way the game was looking so far, but I didn't like the jumping mechanic. Why does it jump for you. There should be an option to have the assisted jump and by reading the other reviews there are so many other bugs in the game that are quite annoying and make the game very unpleasant to play the game.

This game that I was supposed to love, I now almost HATE IT.

Im being forced to upgrade my cpu now to something completely unnecessary just to run around and play a fox or be forced to wait until this game gets fixed.

im lucky im within the 2 hour limit and am most likely going to refund this game.