The gameplay starts out slowly with the red fox exploring the abandoned region and discovering the Guardian Spirit. There are a total of 28 shaman to be saved across the eight chapters with the core amount of gameplay being in Chapter 4 and 5. The gameplay for Spirit of the North: Enhanced Edition is filled with exploring Iceland on a linear pathway and saving fallen shaman. This third person adventure title plays partly as a puzzle platformer and primarily a relaxing journey. Most, not all, abilities are a onetime use and must be recharged by blue flowers, Spirit Blooms, scattered around the explorable map. The Guardian is a blue wisp, or spirit, that allows our small red fox to become filled with power and can use special abilities while charged with energy. The player controls a red fox who becomes entangled with the Guardian of the Northern Lights, a female spirit. Being set in the Nordic region, the game follows suit with the font choice and with use of some Nordic folklore. Beautiful environments with incentive to explore and a story presented silently in a way that is still easy to understand make Spirit of the North a nice game to sit down and relax with.Developed by Infuse studio and published by Merge Games, Spirit of the North: Enhanced Edition originally released for PlayStation and Steam in November of 2019. While the game does have its issues, it’s generally very fun and relaxing to just run around like you own the world. Storytelling in games is constantly evolving, and Spirit of the North is just another lovingly crafted title that takes time in introducing you into a beautiful world. Spirit of the North is one of the very few games I couldn’t help but mess around with the camera mode with, and I was never disappointed. This is absolutely not the case, and these environments not only look beautiful, but they tell a story. Initially, I had thought there wouldn’t be much variety and every landscape would be snow filled with a red and white theme throughout the entire game. This is only amplified by how beautiful the environments are. The speed and freedom is unparalleled, and really feels like you’re traversing a large world. These problems almost disappear when you’re running through giant landscapes and exploring the world, open plains and sliding on ice. Small things like this, as well as clipping into objects relatively regularly while platforming makes the gameplay feel a little less tight. There are times where it seems like you can circumvent a puzzle by jumping on a ledge to walk to the goal, but in reality there’s a wall there when there isn’t a wall on other platforms like that one. It’s fun to jump around and try to get on top of everything, but in reality there are some hard limits to what you can and can’t do, and it’s sometimes hard to differentiate where you’re supposed to go and what is off limits. Collision boxes sometimes have your fox at weird angles on rocks, and this makes platforming more of a chore than it has to be. Not the game-breaking type, but in a way that can kill immersion. The main gripe I have with Spirit of the North is that it’s pretty janky. There never is a sense of feeling lost, it’s really a sense of adventure. When taking the time to appreciate the landscape though, it helps to be slowed down a bit just to take a solid look around. It’s nothing too hard, but if you’re enjoying the free running of the landscape and taking everything in they can feel a bit like roadblocks. I found many of the early puzzles reminiscent of the Zelda series, especially the water puzzles. Aside from the monks, Spirit of the North takes heavy influence from Legend of Zelda-esque puzzles. While I felt like there wasn’t much incentive early on to do this since it wasn’t for progression anymore, I found myself going back and searching stages more often, which really led to my appreciation of the environments. Once I realized I had missed one, I spent much more time exploring and looking for the staves, which light up and rumble the controller the closer you get to a monk. While only ever referenced once for progression, there are monks that you can lead to the afterlife using staves, and typically these are hidden around very large stages so they can be very easy to miss. While games can test your reflexes, Spirit of the North tends to use most of its time testing the player through puzzles and exploration.
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