PixlBit

While browsing through the sale games on PSN, I came across this game. It looked kinda cool but I hadn't heard anything about it. But, hey, it was on sale, so why not? Our download speed here is incredibly slow, so I left the PS4 in rest mode and by the time I got home from work, it had finally installed. I needed a break from Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2, so I figured I'd check out Yonder. This was a little past 9 PM. Next thing I knew, it was 3 AM! So that answered the question of "will it be worth it?"

Yonder's story, in one sentence: you're on a ship, it gets wrecked in the land of Gemea, and you need to roam the countryside and clear the land of Murk and restore the Cloud Catcher to working order.

Murk is yucky. It looks like purple gas clouds and blocks access to other areas of the games. You clear it by finding sprites, which kind of reminded me of the Djinn in Golden Sun. You will have to have found a certain number of sprites to clear each area. You don't have to find all of them in order to clear all the Murk. Nor do you have to clear all the Murk in order to finish the main story, but you'll miss out on some cool stuff if you don't. Sprites can be found a couple of ways - by completing quests in the main story, by solving puzzles, or by interacting with glowing blue areas after dark. Other than clearing Murk, they really don't have any other purpose in the game.

Yonder is kind of a hybrid game. There are elements that remind me of Fantasy Life, Harvest Moon, Zelda, and several other adventure games. It's a crafting/exploring/farming/fetch quest/fishing/find the cats game. The main story is relatively short, and can be completed in a couple of hours. But if you do that, you miss all the fun.

Time plays a role in the game, but there's no sense of urgency. There are day and night cycles, and also seasonal cycles. Various things can only be found during certain seasons, and some things can only be found at certain times of day.

Crafting is an important aspect of the game, as is farming. I spent a lot of time roaming around gathering the materials I needed for crafting, but I found out (a little too late to be of much help, unfortunately) that many of the animals you can tame and keep on your farms will produce those hard to hold onto important ingredients.

Villagers have errands for you to run that will reward you with Old Kingdom coins, something that will have no value until almost the very end of the game. The beauty of these errands is that you don't have to do them in order to complete the game. Heck, there's not even a penalty for deciding you don't want to finish the errand after you've accepted it. I have no idea how many of them there are, because I only did enough to get the trophy for completing ten of them. If you're not trophy hunting or really like meaningless fetch quests, there's no real reason to do them.

There are a bunch of guilds that you will need to join in order to progress the story - Chef, Carpenter, Constructor, Tinker, Brewer, Tailor, and eventually, Master. Again, how much you use these after you meet the minimum requirement to progress the story is up to you. There are certain areas that having access to the master level (as opposed to novice level) crafts in each guild will be much easier to open up, trust me. Plus, its just fun to make things.

Gemea is a huge area, with remote areas that can be hard to access. Mountains, swamps, streams, forests, caves, deserts, and open grasslands are there to explore. And exploration is a huge part of this game. Some of those incredibly hard to access areas give Easter egg-type rewards, making the effort extremely rewarding. Treasure chests can be found all over the world, hidden in some really hard to reach places. Most of them hold items to customize your characters look - hairstyles, shampoo (changes your hair color), etc. Also seeds for your farms. The other reward to exploring is finding the cats. There are cats all over Gemea, and one quest involves finding 55 cats for one villager. You find them by their really loud meows. Again, doesn't need to be done for the main story, just something to do. Planting trees is also a thing. Each area has a certain number of tree plots, brown circles on the ground, that you can plant a tree in. Another thing that doesn't need to be done to finish the story.

As you explore, you'll come across areas where you can build a farm. Once the farm has been built, you can add animal pens, tree plots, and vegetable plots. Animals come in large and small, and you need to discover the species, and then figure out what food item to offer them in order to get them to follow you back to one of your farms. Once it crosses the farm boundary, and you have the appropriate housing for it, you can then adopt it. Different animals produce different items, all useful in crafting. Once you gain access to the Tinker Guild, you can craft machinery that will turn some products into others. You will also need to hire farm hands to keep your farm neat. You do that by offering them food. Beef up your cooking skill, it will make it much easier to hire people. You can also find constellations trapped in rocks

Any place that has water, you can fish. Some fish are extremely useful - they can be crafted into other, more important items, and one is vital for adopting one of the last animals you will encounter in the game, but by and large, the best reason to catch them is to convert them into Old Kingdom coins. Again, seemingly useless until almost the end of the game, but then they become very useful.

One thing you won't encounter is combat. You also can't die. Jumping off a cliff is actually quite fun and sometimes the only way you can reach some of the treasure chests in the game.

The graphics are pretty - the light changes with the time of day, shooting stars light up the sky, constellations appear as you free them from rocks, the leaves on some of the trees change color with the seasons. A neat thing I noticed was that you can see the steam from your character's breath in the cold regions. Sunrises and sunsets are very pretty.

A cool small touch in the game is geocaches. They are small purple boxes that can be found all over the place. When you find one, it has something that another player somewhere else has placed in the box and uploaded to the server. Some people use it to dump their junk that they don't want. I try to send helpful things like hard to find resources, items that I'm done with but are needed for quests, etc.

I do have a few quibbles with the game. The first is inventory management. You only have a limited number of spaces in your backpack, and, unlike other games, you can't upgrade to a larger pack. Shops use the barter system instead of money, so you can't even sell the stuff. Once you start your first farm, it does give access to a storage chest, that I think may hold infinite items, but I'm not sure. The biggest problem is that you have to go to your farms to put things in or take them out, so obviously,you want to only drop off stuff that you don't think you're going to need right away.

My other two very minor quibbles are not being able to explore inside houses, and not being able to swim. If you fall in over your head, the screen goes dark and you wind up back on shore.

All in all, I found Yonder to be a very enjoyable game. Obviously, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it hit the spot for me.