You step foot on the crisp white surface hoping to leave prints or a trail, instead, you are met with one frame pop-in of "animation,” bevelling out where your fox has touched in the virgin snow-its horrid. The snow effects underfoot are also glaringly awful. When you look up close though, you see probably the worst rendition of fur I have ever seen in a game on your fox. It’s impressionistic at best, but downright jagged looking at worst. It sets the scene and paints the colour palette you would expect with some blues, greens, and whites, the snow looks bump-mapped along with the shiny stonework and cavern walls, with reflective water pooling in places, and your glowing character illuminating the caverns and nooks. First and foremost, the scenery is awesome. This quickly dissipates when you look closer into the details. Graphically, you will, at first, be quite impressed with the atmospheric and vast environments. You can jump and steer left and right to follow the line of the tunnels and chasms, however, the animation in this sequence again is amazingly stiff and clunky with your Vulpes Vulpes assuming a stooped posture, tail jolting, as if it's about to drop the most girthy, dehydrated scat of its life. Interestingly, sections where you are bounding downhill almost turn into a snowboarding style mini-game as your animal hurtles down the hills, slipping, sliding and skating across the icy blue surfaces. These involve a lot of platforming, simplified maze-style wandering to find the next mound of stones, and flying down the slopes at the speed of sound to get yourself further into the levels. Much of the gameplay centres on exploration to find ways to progress further. Split across eight chapters, there are 28 shamans to find, fifty spirit blooms, eight ancient murals, 12 sets of runes to match up and a bunch of plague tethers to destroy giving you roughly four hours of content to 100% complete if you are a seasoned gamer. Generally, the puzzles in this game are not very taxing, which unfortunately just makes it all the more uninteresting to play. For the majority of the time, it's a flower or rune to activate and there are a series of mummified shamans that have lost their magical sceptres and you simply have to appease them by returning it back to them. Once you have located something interesting, it's mere seconds to figure out what to do and how to complete it. It's quite monotonous, until you find an interesting building, or discover a decaying monk. Honestly, the first 10-15 minutes of the game will see you lolloping for an obscene amount of time before you get to the next section you need to endure. You simply follow the mounds of stones, trekking across miles and miles of scenery with your thumb firmly pushing that analogue stick upwards. The gameplay is slow but steady as you navigate what seems to be open worlds in a largely linear fashion. The A button lets you yap and bark, which becomes increasingly useful in further chapters to communicate with allied spirits, and finally, the X button interacts with totems and anything else that is usable. Holding L gives you a boost of speed, dashing through the snow twice as fast as your standard amble and the R button lets you jump, so you can bound around the environments reaching higher places and leaping over obstacles. Using the left stick you push forward and your beast lurches into action. You begin in a vast snow-laden tundra, with a sense of awe that lets you feel like you could walk anywhere in this environment, sniff out things in the far reaches, and leisurely advance around the landscapes with such a sense of wonder that absolutely anything could be around the next turn for you to discover. Infuse Studio was formed in 2015 and contains just 3 members who juggle design, music, and various Unreal Engine 4 based techniques required to produce stunning works of evocative art. Spirit of the North is an incredibly simplistic adventure in a similar vein to Rime of Journey, positing a simple, ordinary, common or garden red fox as the main proponent, driving a Nordic folklore laden tale of exploration and intrigue. In a culture of complicated games, with hours of gameplay and meta-level puzzles, super minimal games never really get much coverage and even less praise against its rival games, unless it nails several key pillars of gaming and offers something that really distinguishes itself from the pack.
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