Spirit of the North (PS4)

It was practically inevitable that I’d compare Spirit of the North with The First Tree. Both are indie games I played on PS4 where you play as a fox, explore wide open and often beautiful areas, and undergo some sort of spiritual journey, although The First Tree is happy to throw in narration and make it more about the storytellers than your adventure as the vulpine protagonist. Spirit of the North, however, completely avoids words and practically has no narrative, choosing instead to be a meditative journey where you are meant to extract meaning from some rather basic and repeated images and details.

 

Spirit of the North has you begin as a rather gorgeously detailed red fox, although from certain angles its fur rendering doesn’t look perfect. A strange red corruption has been spotted in the sky, your fox heading after it and joining up with a ghostly blue fox for the adventure. However, while it does seem like you’re meant to develop a sort of companionship with this other fox, very quickly she gets demoted to a mote of light that loses any sort of personality or character. While you could bark at her and get a reply before, she quickly gets downgraded to something more like Navi from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, buzzing around you and sometimes flitting over to areas of interest to highlight them. You don’t seem to be able to trigger it to give you hints manually though, so you often have to hope it will give you some guidance if you’re stuck and wondering what you’re meant to do in one of the many open areas of the game.

Since the game never comes out and says anything about the plot, the fact you’re helping to restore the Northern Lights is mostly conveyed through late game actions and inscriptions on stones and walls. The places you travel through on this journey can be quite stunning and beautiful, the game drawing heavy inspiration from Iceland’s natural environments. Snow-covered glaciers, beautiful green tundra, and dark chilly caves definitely had a lot of love put into their aesthetics even if their design as game environments leave much to be desired. Your fox’s jump is a little awkward and areas it can seemingly traverse aren’t always the solid and steady ground they appeared to be before you leapt up onto them. Later areas in the game begin to incorporate man-made structures, a mystery surrounding the now wiped out people who came before added to the picture, and soon you’ll find lands tainted thoroughly by the red corruption that certainly pull off their unnatural look quite well. The spirits of this wiped out civilization can actually be freed by finding staves and bringing them to the bodies of the dead, but scouring the large game areas doesn’t pay off with much and the process of looking around is often tedious.

 

I can keep dancing around it, but the really big issue with Spirit of the North is its large explorable areas feel barren and often confusing. Your fox already isn’t that great to control thanks to a weak jump, and while you do get new powers over the course of the game like being able to assume a spectral form, this has limitations that make it annoying to use too. The spectral form’s timer is surprisingly tight so if you can’t keen your objective quickly you’ll need to send it off to try again. Running to speed up traversal isn’t great because the fox wears out quickly, and this drags out the moments where you’re sniffing about for whatever it is you’re meant to do. There are puzzles in your path at times and an awful lot of them involve stones with glyphs on them that you need to rotate the tops of to trigger a mechanism, and this gets rather old after it repeatedly reappears without much alteration.

Swimming weighs down the game whenever it emerges, some areas even have puzzles with raising and lowering the water level and thus requiring repeated instances of it. While the first time you see your fox leave the water and shake its fur dry it can be amusing, but its the kind of animation that should be far more restrained in how often it appears and yet it keeps showing up and slows down sections of the game as the game overindulges in sections featuring water. There are some cute animations that are more reasonable like not pressing anything for a while leading to the fox curling up for a nap, but those, importantly, don’t enforce a pace breaker on the player while they’re trying to work out how to get around an area. The worst section of the game is certainly its conclusion, an absolutely massive area with no direction where the actual path to the game’s finale draws no attention to itself and can be easily missed. There are some moments in the adventure where you do simple puzzles, use jump boosts to navigate around, or have a much tighter play area so you can figure out your objective more easily, but it’s rather appropriate the game’s conclusion shows off some of its most egregious issues with environment layouts and lack of direction.

 

Spirit of the North has no combat and the worst thing you really have to worry about is getting too close to corrupted areas, so basically the adventure hinges on exploration, platforming, and puzzles. That final area is a massive area with not much platforming action, no puzzles, and the exploration is mostly to see a world that is fairly uniform in its visuals, but most of the game isn’t so poorly built. They hit on the same sins but in miniature or at least can engage with one of those aspects inoffensively. There are definitely moments you can enjoy the intended serenity of your journey, but it also feels like that’s standing in for anything meaningful either gameplaywise or emotionally. It doesn’t break the mold much when it comes to the details on the fall of the old civilization and your companion is stripped of interesting qualities early on, so you’re left to think about your actual interaction with the world which doesn’t achieve much creative or engaging. Sometimes you may have to run fast to hit jump boosters or act before a switch reverts, but it’s not particularly exciting since failing just means trying again and success doesn’t make you feel clever or skilled. So much of the game’s substance is forgettable, the images that stick with you being the gorgeous environments that could easily trick you into thinking there was more to the game since its bland action left your mind after you stopped playing.

THE VERDICT: Spirit of the North can look beautiful at the right angles and its world can muster up some impressive and wonderful sights, but any love for the environments is harmed by how bland your interaction with them is and how aimless navigation can be. The wordless narrative doesn’t really help it focus on the sensations and emotions since your spiritual partner is quickly demoted to a game mechanic, and the actual story isn’t moving once you have picked up on the clues. These leave the game relying on occasionally awkward platforming, puzzles that aren’t mentally stimulating, and inviting open areas where most of it is wasted space that lures you away from what you’re actually meant to be doing. It’s probably for the best Spirit of the North didn’t try to do more, since at least being aimless and uninspired is better than including outright frustrating elements or broken mechanics.

 

And so, I give Spirit of the North for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. Spirit of the North is the kind of game that goes in one ear and out the other (although the music is actually quite good and perhaps more effective than the rest of the game). Seeing the Icelandic environments is nice and not every moment is a drag, but there were certainly better ways to have the game explore such detailed areas. You can add more to do to an area to make it more involved or you can signpost the proper direction better so that exploring the area is an optional activity instead of something you’ll do as you hope to come across wherever you’re meant to go. The environmental variety is actually quite good, but even when you find puzzles or platforming challenges they swing from so easy they’re boring or oddly demanding and tedious to retry. For a game that seems to be embracing relaxing play and free exploration it’s strange how the spectral fox power dissipates so quickly, and many of your special abilities require special flowers to refill your energy that you need to return to if you mess up a challenge just to drag things out a bit more. While I can’t think of many situations that would be outright broken by being able to air dash or send the spectral fox out without a refill, if there are such cases there could be other ways to strip the power away or you could have a few limited uses of a charge instead of having to refill after every time you draw on it.

 

Of course, overall puzzle design or platforming would need the biggest bump in quality to leave a real impression on the player, because right now all Spirit of the North has to show is conditionally beautiful visuals and a nice soundtrack. While there is an argument to be made for games where you just take your time and drink in the atmosphere, Spirit of the North does have a through line and trying to engage with it is made harder by the environmental design, and considering it’s not that entertaining when you do find what you’re meant to be up to, you can’t really hope to build an entire experience off trying to extract something meaningful from meandering.  While The First Tree isn’t an excellent game, it understood to some degree things like signposting areas of importance, giving you things to do in larger areas, and making a compelling narrative. The First Tree is clearly the superior PS4 indie fox game with a lovely art style, but Spirit of the North could have been if it hadn’t been so loose both with its narrative and its world design.