This place is not a place of honor. If you liked Journey, stay there. If you didn't, don't even think about touching this.

You'll not find gameplay here - this is a glorified chatroom, dressed up as a meditative experience. You can't even talk to anyone - you have to spend *in-game currency* to be able to add people as friends, and then another three batches of that currency to be able to talk to them. While there is a friend code system that bypasses the need to unlock chat, the game's extremely aggressive chat filter will notice if you attempt to sneak one in and drop the entire message.

The gameplay, what little there is, involves exploring ruins of a dead civilization and discovering their downfall. After that, the remaining 'gameplay loop' is to log in every day, do your daily quests which is the only way to progress the Season, then realize you can't talk to anyone and there's nothing to do, then log off. Or spend another 3 hours grinding candles by visiting practically every map in the game, so you can afford one item. Rinse and repeat tomorrow. The sheer amount of grinding in this game has unfortunately made people extremely unwilling to engage socially - the game's alleged selling point, and enforced by some quests. But why spend time silently emoting at someone when you could be farming currency?

Currency is one of the big issues with Sky. Most currencies are capped; the primary one at 20 a day, barring willingness to spend literally five hours grinding them; Seasonal ones at 6 per day. The game claims to possess social currencies, but these are only acquired by other players spending the primary currency on you - which is not something one can just ask others to do. They've grinding to do, after all.

Collecting items is done via exchanging currencies for Spirits' items while they're available. Due to TGC's hysterical paranoia regarding player retention, item prices are ludicrous; 180+ is not a rare sight, and often found deep into an item tree, requiring prior investment to access. This is exacerbated by another system - every two weeks, a singular Spirit from a past season will appear for three days and make *some* of their items available again. For similar prices, in lieu of access to their source Season.
While most Seasons have story quests, these release at a glacial pace, singular 5-minute quest appearing every two weeks. Quest completion is mandatory to progress further, and as usual, if you're too late, these are all you get. Slow-releasing, far too short story quests and item grinding - the lockstep rhythm of every single Season in the game to date.

The controls are abysmal. Movement is slippery and imprecise, the physics mean you'll be sliding on most surfaces rather than walking, the game attempts to "guess" where you're trying to jump to and snap you to ledges... right up until it doesn't
Flying is the only way to reliably get anywhere, but is limited via Winged Light - collectibles that function like Pieces of Heart. Get enough, and you get one more flap before needing to recharge. These are often hidden in secret alcoves and far out of the way areas instead of being placed near logical landmarks, and as mentioned, completion of the game's final area will remove these from you.

The game's maps are tiny. Some of them seem allergic to player flight and will either push you backwards for the attempt, or feature strong enough gravity to simply lock you to the floor. This can feel like flight was added to ferry you between locations, and not a game mechanic.

Interacting with objects is done via a single button, but as usual attempts to guess what you want to interact with and fails spectacularly, prioritizing players over quest objectives or even collectibles. I believe these priorities are *manually set*, based on previous patch notes.

Map entrances have barriers that require world completion to access, which persist even when they're opened, forcing a stop and opening process that takes at least 3 seconds.

The game is plagued with doors that require multiple players to open. Most instances require 2, some 4, and one particularly egregious one demands of 8 players to access a map. Since players cannot chat, the only option is to stand at the door and spam the 'call' button - then be ignored by everyone, who likely just want you to shut up already so they can get on with it.

The camera is easily the game's biggest flaw - aggressively centering behind your character, frequently pointing towards scenery landmarks without input from you. Daring to touch an objective by accident or interact with anything will wrest camera control from you entirely to track the object - and you cannot regain camera control until this sequence has finished.
Cutscenes render your character off-screen even in hazardous environments, risking damage because the game really wanted you to stare at a door. The game now has a "Skip MOST cutscenes" button, quite telling as to what exactly it does. It simply does not function on about 60% of the game's cutscenes, most of which are a door opening over the course of 30 seconds.

The story, atmosphere and music are pleasant, but get a little repetitive - since you're expected to revisit all these areas every single day, the places get stale fairly quickly, and the music can get annoying. Music can at least be muted and substituted with your own soundtrack, with the game providing warnings when attempting to start sequences that rely on music.

The final nail in the coffin is server stability - the game's servers are notoriously and infamously unstable among its community, with frequent so-called "server splits" - the game forcibly removing you from a given player session - an unfortunate common occurrence that has prevented social interactions where game mechanics do not. Game-wide server issues and delayed responses for doing objectives are similarly frequent; the game is not rarely entirely inaccessible or breaks connection mid-session to an error message that plainly states "We may be having server issues" due to how common this is.
Each instance of a map has a so-called "authority" player, who sends their map state to other players such as solved puzzles and the like. The game prioritizes matching you into a session when you enter a map above all else, willing to freeze any and all map interactables until it has done so; when it finds a session to put you into, the Authority player's map state will immediately override yours, frequently solving every single puzzle and object on a map with zero control from you. This is particularly frustrating since there are quests that rely on you personally using these items. To top this, Authority status is frequently wrested from players and passed around; the aforementioned instance dissolutions and server splits will immediately put you into a new one, meaning you will not get to do things yourself even if you're on your own; and makes it impossible to find a private space to gaze at the vistas the game wants you to take in. I've had photos ruined by players spontaneously spawning in due to new instance merges on at least half a dozen occasions.
In-game compensation for longer-lasting server issues or failures is rare, and minimal when it does occur.

All in all, if you want an experience like this that's less riddled with premium items totaling over 20$, play Journey. If you want the stories, find them on YouTube. Sky does not respect your time, and it shows in every aspect; releasing new content on-schedule is more important than making the game feel good to navigate or engage with. Even settings menus are barebones, featuring at most a fullscreen toggle and volume sliders.

So I'll say it again: This place is not a place of honor. This is someone who has forgotten what they stand for.

This review was originally 16,136 characters long. That should say something.

I Guess???? its free, and pretty good for being free, and stuff but like it could use some quality of life/ improvements to camera and controls. Like eye of eden has no reason to be as hard as it is other than the fact that the character gets stuck on random things and ignores you sometimes.

like this game would go from a 4 out of 10 to a 7 out of 10 if you could lock the camera behind you and turn off the... brightness change effect? It has a name, but like when you go from a inside to outside and the game flashbangs you.

This game's gameplay is literally just getting currency to get cosmetics... I would love if you could do many other things besides just gathering candles to get outfits and decorations. There are only like seven places and it gets boring real fast. They haven't added any truly new content. Also, they refuse to fix many bugs that have been present in the game for a long time. I thought I'd never get to see the cape section in the cosmetic try-on place (where you try on hairstyles and sit in the chair). The quest to unlock the rest (like cape section, mask section, and more) is broken and I almost couldn't continue until I somehow got past the bug because that quest became a daily for a day. If it wasn't for that daily temporarily unbreaking it, I wouldn't even get to try on capes in the try-on place. I swear this game has so much potential but it's clear with all the years that they did nothing with it, that it's not going anywhere interesting, unfortunately.