Recent reviews by Mu

Was good in 2012, is still good now.

Finally a sandbox with more explosives than sand

Beautiful.

not fomo

Ignore these negative reviews for the most part because they probably have never played a game before.

The controls are fine, it's not that janky; It was made for a console. It's a fairly easy game, I personally was able to get very proficient at dodging basically every single enemy and ignoring stealth entirely. You don't have to be like me, but the fact I can do this with less than 10 hours played says a lot about the difficulty.

I'm not sure what performance issues people are talking about as it runs perfectly on my computer, which cannot run any modern games hardly at all.

The gameplay is simple. The game gives a fairly unique experience which is the most refreshing part of it imo. It's not a masterpiece of mechanics or anything insane, it's simply something different from the recursive slop every developer makes, which I'm always happy to see.

Plus it's full of animals. Who doesn't like animals?

REVIEW EDITED TO BE MORE SPECIFIC:

My opinion is still never to recommend this game, but I'll try to lay out why it's dangerous here so you can attempt to avoid it.

The game is "intended" to be designed heavily around making friends and helping others. Though, it never actually tries very hard to incentivize this playstyle. There is another issue but we'll get to that.

Another possible way to play is to explore, though as someone who's not even played for very long you quickly run out of new places to go and new things to get. There's reasons to go back, but we'll get to that.

One way to play that's very much taken over the game is 'dress-up'. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE dress-up games to death but this game goes about it in a way that is highly toxic.

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This game has lots of bugs, design flaws, and so many issues that could easily be addressed but it's most glaring flaw is clearly the candles in-game-currency.

This currency is leaned on heavily for almost all things. It's also very clearly designed such that to 'properly' decorate anything, or to dress-up in any way you must either grind a LOT, or spend a lot of money. Essentially what is happening, is one of the newer 'main' gameplay incentives is dress-up, but that method of play is in a choke-hold by microtransactions. Getting to make your character feel like 'you' or at least feel like something you're comfortable or proud of walking around as is always fulfilling. This game makes that difficult.

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(I don't know the working conditions of TGC, but hopefully they also agree that the game could be better)

Another thing I'd like to touch on is the lazy development. It's clear that most of the gameplay systems of this game are copy-pasted from Journey. Now, I LOVE Journey I actually love it way more than Sky, however simply 'copying' everything isn't making a good game. Journey stuck in my heart, the only thing about Sky that stuck in my heart are the friends I've made in it, and I didn't make them because of Sky, but in spite of it. If you play Sky first, then play Journey, it's almost uncanny the amount of gameplay systems just left as-is inside of Sky and it even makes playing Journey super easy as the AI and level design are almost identical.

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Icing on the cake as they say, this game also has extreme censorship. I imagine anyone knowing this was released on mobile before PC would know this is obvious, but do you know just how bad it is? I know too many people who have been muted for over a week from saying something completely innocent and the 'algorithm' somehow taking it out of context or something. Honestly I've said super innocent things like saying "I'm hungry" in a silly way. (That way of which literally no one could take out of context...)

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SO..... Sky is a 'friends' game, but poorly incentivizes it, has cool primary features like dressing up your skykid however you like, except it's heavily gated behind extreme time dedication or microtransactions, you run out of places to explore quickly and don't have many new ways of interacting with them, you get punished by getting muted or half your messages not sending despite trying to 'hangout' with friends in the friends game, and if it couldn't get worse... you have to pay for your friends. Sure... it's only 1 candle... and technically there is a workaround if you use friend codes... but you have to spend a resource you can purchase to BUY access to being a friend with someone. Sadly it only gets worse because every single interaction you can do with a friend is purchased.

This game is fun if you can ignore all of these things, but honestly even then I can't. I still buy things with real money in this game, and yes, there are a LOT of just pure microtransactions, no candles even. I don't like spending money on it, but the cosmetics DO give me joy when I hang out with my friends. I don't feel that the cost that the game has is worth what you can get out of it. I thought the game was going to be this beautiful thing like Journey, and honestly at first it kind of was. When I first made it to Eden I was in AWE. The atmosphere, the MUSIC, the thunder and rumbling from the mountain and krills sent shivers down my spine that instantly made me excited to explore it. That was a feeling I rarely feel in games, and the only time I feel it now is if I listen to the ambience outside of the game and 'imagine' what it felt like. It loses it's awe after you realize the game is functionally pay to win since there is no gameplay loop except hanging out and buying cosmetics.

Anyway, I'm going to keep torturing myself by playing this game, I hope this helps someone.

I really really want to recommend this game, but as it is currently with 2 specific features I simply can't.

These features would be bosses *almost always doing double damage*, and benches being way too far from arenas.
The game experience for me has been this, randomly stumble upon boss, lose my items due to dying after the first 3 seconds, the items are now trapped in the boss room so if I want them back I am forced to run past multiple hazards and very likely to get damaged on the way there, just to finally die again over and over for 3 hours until I either rage quit or finally work around the bad fights.

Some of these bosses are super fun! But the fact I have to cross 10 football fields and basically have to play every boss hitless it just, it's incredibly frankly unfun. I was NEVER a fan of contact damage, I personally find it horrifically lazy game design and it's just not interesting of a mechanic in any video game. If it at least didn't have that, I could maybe enjoy the fights a bit more but the benches being so far are such an intense punishment I almost don't even want to play the game anymore.

I hope they decide to change a few things or add some options to adjust this, or maybe the modders will figure it out, I just simply think the design, while it's more 'hard' I personally felt the original game was hard enough, I had my fun with it and enjoyed the challenge, I didn't attempt to go towards absolute radiance because I'm not that kind of hardcore, but that's exactly why I wanted to play this instead of doing that. Unfortunately, I was given a game that's almost too punishing to be fun for me, I'm sure there's plenty of people who met Moorwing and wanted to throw their computer out the window or refund the game.

yes

Loss of progression is rather unfun.

Deep in Abyss is where it's at, the other mode is a glorified tutorial.

Note: later stages of deep in abyss likes to throw out softlocks like it's candy, so overprepare.