It’s Spring Again (Switch)

When designing children’s entertainment, especially for incredibly young audiences, you are essentially flipping a coin with how an individual will take to it. Kids can latch onto a single piece of media and watch it endlessly, but it’s hard to predict what will catch the fancy of a child. It’s just as likely the kid might show no interest in the product and it ends up tossed aside in favor of what they’ve already attached themselves to. Some game developers targeting this audience will design many different small experiences to broaden their game’s appeal and increase their chances of seizing the child’s interest with at least one part, but then other creators will go all-in on one concept. The thing about making a one-trick pony though is you need to ensure that one trick the pony pulls off is compelling enough to keep the audience coming back, and It’s Spring Again seems to struggle with this.

It’s Spring Again is an incredibly short experience, lasting only around ten minutes even if you take your time playing it. Controlled entirely by the Nintendo Switch’s touch screen, the player is given a brief tour of the four seasons in what is meant to be an educational experience. Beginning with spring, a gentle female voice explains the definitive traits of each season and explains the shift between them, although the details selected do not really provide any details that a mother or father casually explaining the seasons wouldn’t hit on. Winter of course features snow and Fall has the leaves changing colors, but there’s no real description of how life returns in Spring or really any interest in the behavior of fauna over the seasons. Perhaps the only thing that wouldn’t be brought up as a generic description of a season that the game touches on is that Autumn can lead to a rise in mushroom growth, but then It’s Spring Again seems to think Fall is also the season most famous for rainstorms which seems to stand in contrast to the famous rains of Spring. This is likely just an attempt to inject something new besides changing plants into the second half of the game, but there was certainly a missed opportunity to describe Spring as a season rather than a starting point before things loop and the game repeats its seasonal cycle.

There is at least an effort to make the few things the game does show to the player interesting. Color contrast is used effectively, with Summer especially vibrant compared to the subtle tones of Spring. Everything from the sun to the mountain we’re watching has a face and responds to the touch with a tiny animation, but it’s hardly anything interesting enough to repeat. The mountain usually will just rub its face, the trees will shake around a little, and the sun always does the same extensions with its arm-like sunbeams. If you are interested in tapping around to see what can happen, you aren’t really given a canvas for it, most objects either a bit bland when touched or progressing the season’s tasks when tapped. There is still a clear appealing art style present, but the animation isn’t really there to make it more interesting save a delightful rainbow that skitters across the screen briefly. There are four creatures that do give you something unique to look at though, each one meant to embody the season they accompany. Winter features a fat creature covered in snow while Summer features a llama-like animal covered in vivid colors and sprouting flowers, but the animation is again a bit basic for them. Despite being center screen, at best you can expect a wiggle when you touch them, meaning that it’s hard to invest your attention in what could have been the highlight of the short experience.

The tasks you need to complete to move along through the seasons are straightforward enough for a toddler to pick up on but barely interactive. You might click the mountain a few times to make flowers spring up, touch the trees so they shake off their fruits, or tap some clouds to drop snow in Winter, but the only thing that really feels different would be the few moments the sun is hidden behind clouds. You either need to drag them away or click the one its hiding behind, and both are easy enough for a child to grasp and complete while feeling more interactive than what usually amounts to the disguised turning of a page in what amounts to a children’s storybook. Really, the game does feel like a digital story book, the game opting for narration instead of text and if not for the loop once you’ve gone through the seasons, it would fit into a picture book a kid could turn through quite easily. Oddly enough though, this is based instead on a puppet show, and one has to imagine it’s a more interesting experience live instead of in this stripped down, barely interactive version. In pictures I’ve found of the performance I already saw a rabbit that means that they likely do provide more detail on the seasons or at least can make them more animated, the potential to read the crowd and improvise making it more interesting than the rigid sped-through telling this game features.

Admittedly though, It’s Spring Again doesn’t really have a lot wrong with it so much as it just feels threadbare. For the most part, it is an inoffensive experience to play and there is a bit of mild curiosity to be had when it comes to seeing what the next season will bring, even if it becomes clear early on there isn’t going to be much going on in any of them. There are, however, a few technical issues that can make this a risky gamble if you want to just use it as a little story for kids. A single malfunction in a program can instantly flip a child’s mood, especially if you wanted the child to guide the story on their own since it’s simple enough to do so. Even in this short experience, I experienced two different occasions of the game freezing, and when you go to replay It’s Spring Again, you must always start from Spring. The short game length benefits it here since you can push through familiar territory quickly, but there is also a bigger potentially frustrating issue young children might face. Touch detection didn’t seem to be reliable during the Fall segment where you need to help the leaves change colors. I couldn’t identify the specific issue since sometimes it worked perfectly fine and others there were troubles without me changing my methods or the state of the Switch screen, but technical issues in such a small experience feel much bigger than they truly are. This issue with leaf colors did lead to me finding the Hint option though, the player able to add a finger to point at what should be clicked next. This is definitely for the younger players though since the narration tells you what to do and your options are always limited, but it doesn’t hurt to be safe when catering to the 2-5 year old range. To make it even more hands-off though you can just pick Auto-play, but the content seems even less likely to carry the experience if you remove the small bit of interaction that makes it slightly interesting at times.

THE VERDICT: Even if we put aside the small technical issues when evaluating It’s Spring Again, we’re left with a game that doesn’t put in much effort to keep the player’s interest no matter what age they might be. The gentle narration and the cute visuals do establish a pleasant tone, but the game tries to rush through its depiction of the four seasons and ends up feeling all too short. Empty of any activities that really get the player involved in the story and lacking the energy or creativity to make its interactivity interesting, It’s Spring Again puts all its eggs in one basket and hopes that a kid might be randomly hooked by it, but its educational side barely attempts to teach and the game barely allows you to play. The simplicity means you can play through it entirely without much hassle, but it’s a generally hollow experience because it hardly puts in any effort to be more than a small step above a digital story book.

And so, I give It’s Spring Again for Switch…

A BAD rating. The real condemning factor for It’s Spring Again is its blandness. It has a few things that could work in something bigger like the art direction and the narrator is definitely doing her job well, but the whole game keeps evoking a sort of “that’s it?” reaction. Seasons aren’t as distinct as they should be and their traits feel spread out with little thought since Spring can’t really establish itself before things move on. Since each season is short and not explored in even a decent level of detail, the whole experience feels rushed despite there being no part of the gameplay to make the playthrough unenjoyable save the minor technical issues. It doesn’t want to take its time to make a season a playground or really show a child player what it’s all about, but that speed also means it never lingers on an idea long enough that it could be called out for being incredibly basic or overly boring.

It’s Spring Again feels like it could be a decent part of a small collection of educational stories, but instead, it makes up the entire experience of the game and doesn’t have much to show for it. What might be a diversion or minigame in a different children’s game is instead on its own and there’s not much to look at besides a few weird creatures that are just there to look interesting. Honestly, a video of the puppet show would likely be the better experience, and the developers seemingly know this as it is offered as paid DLC for the Steam release of the game. The puppet show is even 20 minutes long, making it the meatier experience and more personal for featuring human performers. While I won’t recommend that puppet show sight unseen, it does seem like It’s Spring Again was a weak attempt to capture some of that magic in a children’s game, and unless your kid is clamoring for it after seeing how it looks, it’s probably a game best avoided by any age of player despite mostly being inoffensively bad.