Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles : PS5 Review

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is a beautiful RPG adventure game with some farming aspects included. It was developed by Prideful Sloth and published by Merge Games and it was originally released in 2017 for Windows PC and PlayStation 4. A year later it was ported over to the Nintendo Switch. For the purpose of my review I played the PlayStation 5 version.

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Yonder, set in a land called Gemea where your main character is sailing towards, is the place you called home as you grew up. However your ship is wrecked in a storm and the land of Gemea is taken over by an ominous purple mist that is called Murk that you have to clear as you progress through the game. Thankfully, you won’t be doing this alone as you quickly meet your first Sprite who will sort of act as your guide throughout the game. These Sprites leave you with the task of finding lost Sprites and you use these Sprites to clear areas of Murk. The premise was simple enough that I immediately felt comfortable venturing out and exploring the land of Gemea. As well as searching for Sprites you’ll need to help various islanders with things. Most of these quests are quite simple search - find and gather style quests where you’ll either need to harvest supplies like logs or you could find yourself searching for someone's lost pets. The quests never really progressed in variety or difficulty unfortunately and alongside this, there’s no combat, health or real consequences for dying so Yonder is a perfect game to chill out and relax with where you can just explore and collect resources for crafting to gradually complete missions. Yonder is a very gentle and cute game where there's little consequence for anything really. I would maybe have liked a little more of a challenge but at the same time it was a welcome break from the typical games I have been playing lately (Returnal - need I say more?). But despite this lack of consequence and difficulty, there’s very little to dislike about Yonder because it's a cute and adorable little adventure game that you can venture through with hardly any cares or concerns.

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There are various different things to discover such as animals that you can adopt into your farm. You don’t have to catch them or hunt them; you simply just win their affections with the help of their favourite things and they follow you back to your farm. This farming aspect is where the game really came to life as it added an extra element to the gameplay that otherwise would have been lacking a lot more for me. You don’t have to do this alone either - you can hire islanders to do farm work for you which keeps all of your animals clean and happy. Throughout Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles, I found myself having memories of playing Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon games with the interactions between the main character and the Islanders being quite light-hearted and comedic at times.

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I think Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles was a good game but I feel like it tried to introduce too many different gameplay aspects but never really followed up on very many of them as terribly important. This means that the game slightly lacked any rewarding kind of feelings for me. Despite this, I do believe there's enjoyment to be found within Yonder particularly for those who enjoy these relaxing exploration games and it's a nice game to take a break with from my typical games. I would say this game would shine the most on the Nintendo Switch version where you could pick it up for 10 or 15 minutes during a break time or a commute but then at the same time you could easily lose a few hours to this game just wandering around, finding Sprites, clearing Murk and growing your animal collection!

Lj's Rating: 3 magical Sprites out of 5.

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For more information on Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles use the following links...

Prideful Sloth - Developer | Facebook | Twitter | Website

Merge Games - Publisher | Facebook | Twitter | Website

Many thanks to Merge Games for the Review Key.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles | Steam | PlayStation | XBox | Nintendo

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