Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is a charming and visually pleasing experience that will remind you immediately of 3D Legend of Zelda titles, mainly The Wind Waker, in how the towns, island, and citizens are portrayed.

A perfect approach to introduce kids in RPGs and a good choice for those who wish to enjoy a friendly and peaceful game.

This beautiful adventure transports you to an amazing world filled with a wonderful soundtrack. As far as gameplay is concerned, Yonder never becomes complex, instead opting for a simple, but charming experience. Highly recommended.

Prideful Sloth has created a well balanced game with a great artistic style and an amazing OST. Great game for the players that enjoy exploration and adventure.

Despite these niggles, Yonder is obviously a fantastic game for adults to play with their children, and for slightly older children to be allowed to play unsupervised. Even for adults it's surprisingly beautiful, and a soothing breath of anxiety-calming non-violence. But the older you get, the less mileage you might receive from Gemea.

In some ways, Yonder reminds of Animal Crossing with a bit of Fantasy Life thrown in, if one squints and tilts their head sideways. All three offer pleasant busywork and pastel colors, and they’re all just the sort of thing if a person’s in the mood for it. However, I strongly suspect that the optimal audience is comprised of kids looking for a game that offers a lot of easily-accomplished Stuff To Do without fear of restarts or penalties. Yonder: The Cloud catcher Chronicles isn’t a great fit for me and I suspect most seasoned players will bow out in a hurry, but I’m going to let my eight-year-old son sit down with it tomorrow, and I imagine I’ll have to pry him off of it with a crowbar.

Much like the fauna that inhabits its world, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is a beautifully odd creature. The things it does well it does extremely well, which leaves me baffled at some of the obvious drawbacks that limit its scope and longevity. With that said, I am massively impressed by what such a small team was able to accomplish, and the attractive launch price certainly makes it all the more appealing.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is a delightful little game that can appeal to players of all ages and skill levels. The island of Gemea – complete with its atmospheric weather and seasonal cycle – makes for the perfect destination if you're looking for a relaxing virtual vacation.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is an enjoyable enough adventure, but it’s missing a hook to get players invested. The game wants you to get lost in the economy and exploration it offers, but in just performing these menial tasks for their own sake it fails to create any moments where the entire experience is more than a series of distractions.

Quotation forthcoming.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles has an earnest heart and an anxious mind. Brilliant landscapes and gorgeous vistas create a waking daydream while economic riddles and perfunctory direction recall the drag of reality. Yonder's strides, despite an admirable form, don't seem to take it anywhere.

Yonder offers a beautiful world and a big heads-up to the bigger franchises of this planet. The fact that only three people developed it, make this game very special. It is too bad the search for Sprites is exhausting, cause otherwise this could have been a pretty awesome game.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is a fun, friendly and visually stimulating sandbox with a world that invites you to relax and have fun. But the lack of variety in the chores to do, through simplistic and not very deep mechanics, ultimately affects the game in a negative way.

Yonder has some interesting aspects to it, and while they really tried to throw in everything and the kitchen sink into it minus combat, many of them fall flat or shallow. The exploration is the best part of the game by far, and while the other parts of the game may be to shallow for me, others may find enjoyment out of them. Even then, the pacing is well done and players will have a pretty view the entire time. I’d say wait for price drop, but when that happens check it out.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is a lovely, sedate open world adventure game that inexplicably gates its crafting mechanic behind an obtuse, tiered system that renders it moot.

Yonder is beautiful and relaxing, but only up to a certain point. It's great for the first few hours, wandering around and discovering new sights, but the world ultimately leaves you wanting more depth and personality to explore.

In the end, Yonder is undeniably a fantastic game to sit back and chill with. If you're looking forward to some exploration, collection, and light building and farming elements, then Yonder is definitely right up your alley. However! There should be a heavy emphasis on "light" in the sentence up above! This is not the next Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley. No, this is a game with few puzzles, no combat, and filled to the brim with fetch quests and item collection. Yonder isn't without its charms, to be sure. But deep and engaging game play (and story) definitely isn't one of them.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles offers an amazing world to play in, but an underdeveloped story and menial side-quests offer little to keep players interested.

This is a title aimed at players who want a peaceful adventure, where exploring is the key. If you're a more experience player looking for something challenging or deep, you might have to look elsewhere.

Even with its flaws, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles manages to create a beautifully peaceful experience.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is a beautiful canvas that needs more detail to make it a masterpiece. Gemea is an enchanting location and the majority of systems in the game function well, but the magic hook is missing. The story isn’t engrossing and the quests just blend into each other for the most part, as do the characters that give them. Gemea is magical, the content not so much.

Simple quests, a lack of tutorials, and little-to-no backstory makes Yonder feel unpolished, in direct contrast to its whimsically charming setting. [Sept 2017, p.84]