Spirit of the North Review: Fire and Ice

 

A red fox and his spirit friend travel across Iceland, fighting back a toxic fungus engulfing the landscape.

 

Spirit of the North uses a wordless narrative structure and minimalist environments to evoke curiosity and wonder in the player. Human corpses and crumbling ruins are the only signs of past inhabitants in the mostly vacant landscape of gorgeous snowdrifts, ice caves, and basalt columns. Curiously, the environments managed to feel expansive despite being surprisingly linear.

 

The fox will have to navigate the cliff edges, jump crevices, and run along tilting seesaw-like structures to progress from one area of the world to the next. Every so often there will be a simple puzzle, like vine barriers or rotating stone pillars, that require the assistance of your supernatural fox friend tag-a-long. There is also a collection of shaman spirits that can be set free by finding and returning their staves.

Left: Spirit power is sucked out of magical flowers. Right: The spirit power is used to activate magical stones.

 

Simple puzzles require the fox to light rock carvings using magic(?) to open passages or raise water levels. Other times tainted areas will need to be cleared with a fox cry.

New pelt colors are unlocked by returning staves.

Platforming is a big part of the gameplay experience, something I am not particularly good at. The platforming in Spirit of the North is fairly forgiving. Most jumps aren't over particularly large gaps and the player is never punished for failing a jump. This is very much inline with the game's laid-back nature, but I am certain the sluggish controls and noticeable delay when jumping also have something to do with it. The fox has a terrible turn radius and movements that aren't very precise, making it difficult to accurately land where you want to. More irritating than adjusting to the jump delay, is the numerous bugs and glitches that exist. Invisible walls popping up in doorways or the fox sticking to the scenery. It happened at least once every chapter and couldn't be undone without resetting the game.

Left: Delays when jumping make it difficult to land where you want. Right: It's hard to tell which structures are functional and which are decorative.

 

 

Spirit of the North is visually quite beautiful, narratively straightforward, and elegantly simple, but  not quite the lift-your-soul type of experience it aspires to be. The lack of clear direction in the environment makes it hard to figure out where you're supposed to go at times, or where you even can go, and the delay when jumping is a constant hindrance to progression.

First posted to videogamegeek.com on November 27, 2020.

 

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