Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles PC Review

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles takes a different path than most games, shifting focus from battling foes, downing bosses and upgrading armor or weapons to a more peaceful experience. Indeed, there are none of the things mentioned above and death is not a factor. The closest you can get to it is when you wander into deep water, which prompts the game spawning you back on land. The focus of the titles lies, instead, on exploration, discovery, crafting and trading. And, while it’s not unheard of for games to go down this route, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles gets some elements right and others less so.

From the very first moments it becomes evident that Gemea, the island where Yonder The Cloud Catcher Chronicles takes place, is truly beautiful. Indeed, stylistically, Prideful Sloth have nailed things just right. Making use of a cutesy aesthetic, Gemea is home to endearing NPCs and animals, wonderful towns and different biomes, each with their own particularities. From green lush fields, to deserts to forests with patches of cherry blossoms, there is a good variety of locations to stumble upon. Every single time I came across a new town or biome type I found myself stopping for a moment to take in the view. This, no doubt, is also aided by the title’s great sound design. As you move from place to place, your footsteps will be accompanied by birds chirping and the noises of other critters. Go to a coastal area and the sea will make its presence known. Roam open fields and the wind makes foliage move in its wake. Caves are, perhaps, the place where the attention to detail regarding the sound design becomes most clear, as your location determines the way sound propagates around you. All these elements build a very welcoming atmosphere which, ultimately, makes the often required backtracking surprisingly pleasant, to the point where even upon unlocking fast travel stones I chose to walk from place to place. Add a vast array of cosmetic items like earmuffs, backpacks and even a giant bow and you’ve a game that brims with personality.

It’s not just walking that you’ll be doing, however. Time will be spent chopping down trees, picking up flowers, planting seeds and gathering stone. Resources tend to be plentiful, although certain types are specific to certain areas. Upon getting a fishing rod you’ll be able to, well, fish. The way the minigame works is that you have to move your bobber in front of a fish and then maintain a needle inside a triangle for a certain duration. All in all, I found the minigame to be a bit too much hassle for its worth. All the resources you gather will be used in trading with NPCs and crafting a variety of things. As Gemea has no currency of its own, certain resources will be more valuable in certain towns. In fact, certain crafting materials can only be bought in certain towns which, while incentivizing more frequent visits, can start feeling like a little bit of a chore fairly quickly (looking at you, Glue and Mortar). The game also makes use of a day/night cycle and seasons which can determine whether or not certain creatures appear or certain travel portals are active.

Crafting and gathering are central to Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles as they are required in both building farms and completing quests. There are more than enough quests to go through and they always require you to go from one place to the next and provide an NPC with required materials. Early on, this is a good way of having you explore the map, which, as I’ve mentioned earlier, is quite possibly the best thing about Yonder. If there’s a nitpick to be mentioned, it’s the fact that gathering wood and stone requires individual clicks, instead of being completed by just holding down the mouse button. While the enticing exploration contributed to gathering not feeling dull, I could never convince myself to get too much into farming.

Farms can be built on specific plots of land after which they offer a tiled area where certain buildings can be placed. Naturally, in order to build these buildings you’ll not only need specific recipes (obtained by joining guilds), but also resources. What you can essentially do on a farm is house animals found in the world, plant seeds, trees or, if you’re a Tinker, create contraptions that convert a type of resource into another. There are a number of farm plots spread across Gemea and each of them can have a farmhand to look after it. Strangely enough, in order to convince someone to be a farmhand, you have to feed them a number of food items, after which they’ll work for you without much complaining. In fact, I haven’t really seen a farm hand after having assigned them to any of my farms. What kept me from getting too much into farming is its static, hands-off nature. You build a pen, you get an animal to follow you (which it does clumsily, at a very slow pace, always getting stuck on terrain) and that’s about it. It will sit there producing a type of resource which you can pick up upon returning. After getting one farm up decently and planting some seeds on another of them, I resorted to mostly using them for their storage capacity as resources come more easily through trade.

Storage also ends up becoming a problem. Your backpack, although having a decent amount of space, will eventually fill up. In order to craft anything (or wear cosmetic items), you need the required materials in the backpack. This made it so that I found myself throwing certain items away in order to pick others up, or having to go way too often back to a farm (storage is shared between them) to pick items up efficiently .Usable items cannot be selected with individual keys, requiring, instead, going through them all with the scroll wheel. The backpack could also, use a search function, as when it’s full, the sheer variety of stuff you can have in it will make finding what you want to discard a tad difficult. Per total, the controls feel a bit floaty at first, but don’t take long to get used to. It’s worth commending the developers for allowing seamless switching between keyboard and controller, which also changed the button prompts accordingly. As far as the aforementioned guilds go, you’ll essentially find masters as you explore. After completing one quest (which generally requires materials available for purchase in that same town), you receive a handful of recipes. Craft a bunch of those and you become a Master yourself, granting access to some more recipes. There are plenty of things to craft. The lack of much interaction between them, however, makes the entire system feel fairly shallow.

Tied into the story there are Sprites, collectable spirits which aid you in removing Murk (dark purple matter) from various area across the map. While these can be seen as a light way of measuring progression, getting them is done without much hassle. Sometimes you may be required to, again, get certain resources to a shrine, or an NPC, but I had little trouble finding enough to clear Murk. This ties in to a meta-mechanic involving area happiness which never really came into play much. When it comes to its main quest, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles stumbles. While in tune with its overall intentions, the story is short, predictable and treats players to an anti-climactic ending. If it wasn’t another thing pushing you towards exploration, there’d be little reason to see it to its end (save for, maybe, unlocking the Master Crafter). Not that the game ever pushes you into doing it. It’s recommended to do so, at least up to a point, as it introduces required tools and guilds, but the game never pressures you into anything. And here is something it does right. This carefree, pressureless approach to exploration is precisely what made me enjoy the time spent in Yonder’s company. I did notice its flaws frequently, but my enjoyment wasn’t stifled for the simple fact that I was running through gorgeous locales, accompanied at times by the sounds of nature, or the musical score which fits the game like a glove and never intrudes when it’s not supposed to. But I did still notice the flaws.

By far, the biggest gripes I have with Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles are the following. While the NPCs are endearing, they never represent much aside from the few lines of text they throw at you when going up to talk to them. Sure, the cat lady asking you to collect her 55 cats and the adventuring comedian searching for an epic joke may steal a fleeting smile from you, but that’s it. There’s nothing really memorable about them. In fact, beneath the surface they’re fairly shallow. This is also not helped by the writing being hit-or-miss. But by far, Yonder’s biggest misstep lies in not exploiting its world more. As I drew closer to finishing the main story, a process which I didn’t necessarily go out of my way to prioritize, I got increasingly bugged by how little you can interact with Yonder’s world. So much so that after spending some time with the game (finishing the main story and a good portion of the side quests), when it told me I could continue playing, I asked myself “what for?”. Indeed, it was relaxing and interesting up to that point but, with the world explored, I had seen everything I wanted to see. The side quests remaining would have just rewarded me with 5 more recipes or a “Thank you” from an NPC. It simply left me wishing that I could interact more with its welcoming world, but that wasn’t going to happen.

To some, Yonder will be just a drawn out series of fetch quests lacking a worthwhile reward. It didn’t feel that way to me, though. When it comes to carefree, pressureless exploration and discovery, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles does its job properly. There are these small moments, like jumping from high up for the first time, only to see your character whip out an umbrella and float slowly to the ground, which add uniqueness to the experience. Then, very good production value and the freedom to essentially go wherever, truly make Gemea a place worth exploring. Delving into farming and crafting, however, will run you into systems that are perhaps a bit too simplistic for their own good, while the story isn’t anything to write home about. As far as relaxing exploration of a beautiful world goes, Yonder fully delivers on its promise. It’s a pity it doesn’t do more with its other components.

Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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