Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles has been out for a while, over a year and a half actually. I’d heard of it before, but never really looked closely at it until now. The reviews are fantastic on it, and everyone seems to love it. The game is a love letter to open world adventure and relaxation with no heavy focus on, well, anything. So let’s take a closer look at the latecomer Xbox One port of this surprisingly popular game.
Yonder is the story of… you. You choose a generic custom character with no name whose boat crashes on the rather large island/continent of Gemea. Because no one had ever done a boat crash for a plot starter on a game before, right? Yonder is chock full of trope-filled clichés like this, but it seems like it’s done entirely on purpose because it’s so familiar it’s almost comforting. Yonder purposely evokes a sense of many classic games and mixes those together in a mélange of pretty landscapes and cute animals. There are some nature spirits involved in your rather thin backstory and you wash up on shore and kind of commune with them. In return, the Sprites join you and help you clear purple “Murk” from the land, making people happier and such. That’s pretty much the extent of the plot.
It’s hard to classify Yonder. It’s part Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild, but without combat. It’s part Harvest Moon, but without serious farming. It’s part RPG, but without any experience or armor classes since there are no actual enemies. It’s part Animal Crossing but without any of the deeper community involvement. Yonder is almost like Australian developer Prideful Sloth took the surface ideas for all of the above games and tossed them together in a hat, pulling them out one by one. You don’t really accomplish anything in the game and the story is utterly non-compelling. All the quests are essentially meaningless and you ultimately just make that section of the island happier, which can also be accomplished by, um, planting trees. None of these things requires actual effort either. Everything is done at the touch of a button, aside from fishing, which was slightly challenging and the closest Yonder gets to becoming truly interactive.
Even catching animals for your farm consists solely of feeding them random things you picked up from the environment and then walking back to your farm with them. That’s it. If you get gratification from cute animals emoting cartoon hearts when you press the X button and then bouncing happily after you so you can put them in a free range pen and auto-milk them, prepare to be utterly (or udderly?) fulfilled. If you’re like me, it’s more tedium. I think the point where I gave up all hope for the survival of the human race is when a woman in one town essentially ordered me to find her cats that the neighbor’s dog had scared off. After I made the dog a cat toy so he wouldn’t scare her cats again, she told me to find her cats…all 55 of them . I’ve never wanted to kill an NPC so fast in my life.
Even the guild quests are incredibly pointless. Make 1000 G worth of clothes. It doesn’t matter what the clothes are. You’re done? Oh! Now you’re a master tailor…here are more clothing patterns! What’s clothing good for? Nothing you say? How…fascinating! And that’s essentially Yonder. You wander about , just doing stuff with a fairly intuitive interface, and utterly relaxing and forgettable music, while the day and night cycle of the island blazes by so fast you can barely blink, and then you accomplish nothing. Ironically, it’s kind of like the trophy systems for Steam/PSN/Xbox Live. Non-accomplishments that make people feel like they’ve “done” something, even though they’re just arbitrary goals that the game designers set to make you feel better about yourself.
I guess in that sense, Yonder is an utter success and it makes sense that people would love it. It checks pretty much every box for non-accomplishment accomplishments that you can possibly check. And I do have to say, it’s a pretty game. The vistas, the sun angles, the cute animals, everything about Yonder is pretty great looking. Other than occasionally encountering a new animal or structure though, I felt that the game became graphically repetitive within a few hours. Beautiful, but you’ve seen most of the core imagery pretty quickly, at least until you start unlocking new areas since it’s a ridiculously big island.
I think the best way to describe Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is to compare it to an adult coloring book. It’s relaxing, beautiful, and utterly meaningless, much like coloring a mandala with crayons. It doesn’t tell a deep narrative story, you don’t really do anything, you just play it to relax. And on that level it succeeds beyond your wildest expectations, at least for most people. If you’re like me and have certain expectations of plot, development, and creativity, you will not enjoy this game. It will make you tense and irritable and slightly stabby. If you want to mindlessly wander back and forth catching cats and picking flowers, this is definitely the game for you. And apparently there’s an absolutely huge market for that, as the Xbox One is the final console for Yonder to be ported to. It’s already on the Switch, PS4, and PC, and getting rave reviews on all three.
Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is a well-built game. No glitches, gorgeous visuals, a robust menu system, and intuitive controls. It ironically just doesn’t have any spirit. At least half of everyone will love it anyway, which is as much a commentary on society as a simple fact, but it’s not a bad game. It’s just not very stimulating either. Expect cute mediocrity and you won’t be disappointed.
This review was written based on a digital copy of Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles supplied by the publisher. It was played with an Xbox One X on a 55” 1080p Sony LED TV. After playing Yonder, I cancelled my massage appointment for the week. It really is quite relaxing. Save money on sleeping pills. Buy Yonder.