Unfortunately, every optional reunion after that felt the same until I began to simply ignore them. The first time I reunited a fallen Shaman with his staff felt meaningful. It’s all very minimalist and whilst I managed to piece together that something catastrophic had happened, my place in the world and a lot of the reason I was restoring parts of it felt unexplained to the point of disinterest. Whether that's a forgotten ruin, the remains of former inhabitants, or an image carved into a rock. One of the game’s few narrative devices, it did a really good job of guiding me through each area and complementing each moment.Īside from the soundtrack, the story is borne from the environment itself. However, it also wasn’t scared of ramping things up when called upon or stirring up emotions when the story called for it. The soothing twinkle of piano complemented calmer moments, gently asking me to take in my surroundings and slow down the pace. A beautiful orchestral score follows the player throughout the game and never gets old. One area where Spirit of the North does shine, however, is its soundtrack. There are moments here - trampling through snow, sliding on sheets of ice, getting stuck in tar - that would have felt much better had the tech been implemented.
After all, it’s early days yet and it’s easy to give Infuse Studio the benefit of the doubt and say they didn’t have time. Now, I’m not knocking the game too much for this. Similarly disappointing, although to a lesser degree, is a lack of implementation of the DualSense controller. There is some nice work done with light and shadows, particularly given that there’s plenty of spiritual glowing going on, but to put such a thing on a podium when the fundamentals are lacking seems trivial. It can look good in motion too but, whilst environments can often be sped through, stopping to explore only serves to highlight more of the game’s glaring issues. The game’s landscapes can appear beautiful at first, but on closer inspection they just don’t hold up.
I wasn’t expecting Spirit of the North to be a graphical powerhouse by any means but, this being the ‘Enhanced Edition’ of the game, it did very little to take advantage of the power of the PlayStation 5.
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