Yonder: The Cloud Catcher CHronicles is Farming with a short story.
From the indie developer Prideful Sloth, based in Australia, comes the farming simulator Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles. Yonder appears to be the developer’s first release. Prideful Sloth states on their site “who take a micro-AAA approach to high quality game development”. In all respect, Yonder misses the mark forYonder: The Cloud Catcher CHronicles is Farming with a short story.
From the indie developer Prideful Sloth, based in Australia, comes the farming simulator Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles. Yonder appears to be the developer’s first release. Prideful Sloth states on their site “who take a micro-AAA approach to high quality game development”. In all respect, Yonder misses the mark for this claim, but makes up enough in other areas enough to get a recommendation from me.
Before moving onto key elements of the game, a shout out to the devs for not gender-locking cloths! It’s a refresher.
Yonder retains a simplistic style & yet still pulls off some beautiful sights.
Yonder has a tons of lens flare, and other dramatic and subtle effects that enhance the beauty of the game. In addition, there are some pretty easily recognizable creatures, like Groffle (kind of like a furry cow) and even has clothing based on this creature. The game comes with a night and day cycle, a seasons cycle, and weather (though it doesn’t appear to affect much in the game besides aesthetics, and a few missions. More on that in the next paragraph.) All the terrain seems to have a purpose too: find a little nook or cranny? It probably leads to somewhere!
Towns and NPCs leave something to be desired. Many of the NPCs look like clones of each other. After playing for 18 hours, I can’t remember many of the NPC’s names or what they looked like, besides perhaps a green-haired chef, and a “wizard.” While the acoustics of the game are pretty solid, NPCs grunt every time you speak with them, and the gender they may identify with, doesn’t really match their appearance. Building assets are also very generic looking. The way to describe it best: is if you went to a theatre, and there was a prop town on stage.
Farming Aces; Tasks & Interfaces.
By far, Yonder’s strongest mechanics are farming. I’ve found that players can maintain up to six farms (though I’ve only found 4 so far), pre-decided in certain locations throughout the island known as Gemea. Farming is a bit different in Yonder compared to other games. Instead of hunger, farms have an overall “Animal Care” rating. Constructible items such as Fodder Throughs (which don’t need to be restocked once built), and the interaction “Care For” seem to improve this stat. Cleanliness is related to poop that your animals will leave around the farm, which can be cleaned up by picking it up, or having a farmhand take care of it automatically (Farmhands are generic NPCs you can meet in game. Once these NPCs reach 100% happiness from food items, they can be assigned to a specific farm, where they go into game oblivion aka they just act as a stat to that farm and don’t exist anymore, until a different NPC is assigned to that farm) Farming is very basic and easy. Once players can craft the Garden Plots and Tree Plots, players can plant seeds they’ve found from places like barrels, tall grass, and NPCs. No watering is required, it’s all pretty much automatic. Simply collect the fruits and vegetables once they’ve grown, and no replanting is required. Farmhands will automatically bring grown goods into your item chests.
While the farming is strong with this one, tasks and interfaces are not currently on par. The story is very short and becomes more of character development, than a story about the island itself. Many of the tasks also seem very annoying. For example: Another quest involves waiting 2 days for , yet when you , you skip 3 days automatically. Players don’t have the option to sleep during the night to skip passage of time, so the best option is to go watch a YouTube episode while you have your client sit there until the time has allotted. There are some redundancies in the UI too like 7 recipes for “Cooked Fish” which all use different types of fish, but result in the same item. There is also the issue of not having a mass produce button for crafting, forcing the player to use their clicky finger skills until their desired amount of crafted item. It’s only possible to track one task at a time on screen, unless you want to open the task menu, or your hand dandy compass, and in addition, when you’re on the farm, your task tracking is on screen. (Oh also, pushing ESC doesn’t allow players to exit the compass menu, and instead must push R again on the keyboard).
*Breaths*...but I digress! Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is WORTH buying!
While I may have a lot to say about the UI & tasks, I generally appreciated the game. There is a lot more positives and negatives I didn’t touch on, but the devs seem to be an active bunch, and while reviewing/playing the game, they introduced a new item called the “traveler’s knot” which is a handy craftable item that allows players to teleport to any of their owned farms. Make sure to check out Yonder on Steam & PS4… Expand
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