Sky is an appalling grind fest if you came from Journey, with rather cringeworthy attempts at being profound – it just looks good if used to mobile.
I’m saying this as someone who played Sky during early beta and as a past student of game design – during class we studied Journey, with my teacher having seen Robin Hunicke, a Journey designer, analyse it live in person. (ThatgamecompanySky is an appalling grind fest if you came from Journey, with rather cringeworthy attempts at being profound – it just looks good if used to mobile.
I’m saying this as someone who played Sky during early beta and as a past student of game design – during class we studied Journey, with my teacher having seen Robin Hunicke, a Journey designer, analyse it live in person. (Thatgamecompany basically shut down after Journey and most people left, confirmed from an interview w/ Matt Nava & Chris Bell)
Sky fares poorly as a flying game, a social game and a narrative:
For a game called Sky, there is surprisingly little amount of time where you’re far from ground, and very few areas which have level design with emphasis on vertical height. Additionally this is poorly balanced unlike in Journey or in a beautiful flying game, Laya's Horizon. It's possible to get a lot of wing power in Sky and frequently expected (e.g. for daily quests) that you go over the early levels which are optimized for players with not a lot of wing power – not like in Journey where you can’t have vast amounts of wing power from the end during early levels. So what ends up happening in Sky is: very often you’re trying to fly and skip over the ground areas most of the time – this is a poor experience because you're encountering nothing where you’re flying, and you’re skipping the areas where the content is. It means that you’re often flying, landing to recharge, flying, landing to collect a thing. Meanwhile Laya's Horizon has flying hoops, obstacles & boosters everywhere in the air, and your flying run ends if you land, so you’re encouraged to stay airborne for as long as you can.
The design of social aspects with strangers in Sky are largely forced and insincere – for example, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had other players glitch to bypass multiplayer doors in Vault and leave, rather than helping other people open them. If you do make connections with other people, it’s not really developed through gameplay like in Journey, because it’s not immediately rewarding to stay with a stranger in Sky. You’re more likely to develop it through chat if anything, than through deliberate gameplay on the part of developers (as an indication of this, players are mostly like to hang out with people who speak their own language).
In Journey, for one thing, the other player looks like you AT FIRST GLANCE regardless of robe color, which helps to foster empathy. And in Journey, it’s always immediately rewarding to be with them because your movement is always slow when alone (eventually you have to mostly stick to walking only). So having another player nearby helps you to recharge your cape pretty fast for flying (balanced w/ both vertical & horizontal direction) AND both of you can continue to move independently. Meanwhile in Sky, other players are always shadows at first, and can have glamorous cosmetics that are designed for showing off and inducing envy so you want to have them too — not conducive for empathy. For movement in Sky, you can jog, and recharge with butterflies, wax etc – so movement is not as hindered when alone, meaning that having other players are not as symbolically important but just a convenience for your movement. And when other players are flying with you, only one person can lead. This hold-hand feature was probably designed because when flying horizontally, it’s very easy to diverge from nearby players quickly. But holding hands while flying is a very passive multiplayer experience, so it’s not surprising that people frequently describe themselves as "batteries".
And now to the grind. Good old Minecraft offers a richer, better and more sincere multiplayer experience than Sky. You can build, fight mobs, explore worlds, collect. In Sky, relationships are reduced to exchange of commodities, and to get those commodities involves very repetitive mechanics. To collect a lot of commodities, people memorise the exact specific locations of candles, plants, tickets and what-have-you. For daily quests, you have to figure out where the places are – the wiki is a fan-made resource that people rely on to make up for the poor design. There are 6+ currencies you can grind for, and that’s what you’ll mostly be doing together. Yippee. The grind is deliberate, to make you fork over ridiculous $$$ to skip it.
Finally the narrative arc is an incoherent, superficial copy of Journey – an emotional flatline. It’s as if they copy-pasted, without knowing why things worked, while forgetting to copy some parts, and adding stuff without incorporating it properly. E.g. Eden is a meaningless difficulty spike. There are 7 gods that you see 2-3 times with no emotional development. Krill can spot you through walls, making them annoying, not profound. It’s impossible to make out the story of spirits. In Journey there's a lore explanation for the flight power symbols, but none in Sky. Etc.… Expand
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