Spirits, a charming physics-based puzzler by Spaces of Play, is a simple game that sucks you in almost immediately but eventually leaves a lot to be desired. Your job is pretty simple: guide the leaf spirits through different levels, dodging pitfalls, blocks and spikes until they finally arrive at a spiraling portal to be whisked away. It’s a pretty easy game and each level is relatively non-challenging. That is until you decide you want to conquer each level and come out with perfect results… that’s when the game becomes really challenging.
Name: Spirits | Developer: Spaces of Play | Category: Puzzle | Players: 1 | Version: 1.0.8 | Size: 37 MB | Price: $2.99 |
See, you have to sacrifice some of your spirits right off the bat in order to create blowing clouds, climbing vines, spinning diggers and shapes that block the flows of wind. If you can get the remaining spirits to the portal without losing many of them at all, you feel better about yourself and can go out into the world knowing that you did your best. I tended to save as many as I could but didn’t sweat the details. As long as I got past a stage I was OK with the untimely death of a few adorable spirits. Still, I like the fact that the game challenges the player but lets the player decide just how challenged.
You’ll likely hear about the art style in Spirits more than anything. It’s true that the game shines in the art department, looking like something out of a wonderful animated movie. I have to agree that the game looks great and feels warm and inviting on the pretty screen of my Nexus tablet, but I wouldn’t really call the art all that original. It’s lovely, but we’ve seen it before. It’s possible that the developers were paying some sort of homage to artists before their time, but it’s also very likely that, like many artists in gaming, they worked the hardest on the game’s systems and made the art a second priority. Again, it’s not bad art at all, but it’s nothing new.
Physics puzzlers can tend to dry up rather quickly. I loved the Hell out of Amazing Alex, but that’s because each stages solution was a bit different from anyone else who played it. I could even return to a stage in Alex and it would be different from before because I might discover some new solution or arrangement. In Spirits, I will likely discover the smoothest operation for each level and stick to that each time. There’s a lot of fun in discovering those optimal builds or arrangements, but the fun is temporary.
I think many gamers mistake a title’s familiar appearance and gameplay as evidence of quality or originality. When we see a game like Spirits and love how pretty and relaxing it is and how fun the puzzles are, we might forget that we are reacting to how much the game reminds us of other games that we loved in the past. Spirits is fun and clever, but only because it is built on the backs of other, earlier works. Luckily, as with most titles on the Play market, it doesn’t cost much at all. It’s worth the price even for the few hours of enjoyment one might get from it before realizing that it’s all been done before. That’s not really a bad thing, though. Many games are basically homages to earlier games. Still, I grow about as tired of Spirit’s art style and gameplay as I do of tower defense games or jewel-match games.
Should you grab Spirits? Of course. Should you expect it to be more than a few hours of late-night, tucked-in-bed puzzle gaming? No. But that’s alright. The developers quite possibly wanted to make a game that acts just as Spirits does. It casts a slight spell on you, plays you some nice music and shows you some pretty pictures, then tacks on some relatively fun puzzle gameplay. If they charged more than they did, however, I would tell you to skip it for something better.
