#style: 3d

[iridium-quality-salad]

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles

[ID: Banner of the game Yonder. It shows an illustrated scene of a farm. In the foreground, a brown-haired player character and a small red fox are napping next to a big fluffy brown animal with huge horns. In the background are two wooden animal pens with red roofs and a pair of the same horned animal, on adult and a young one. The sky is blue and the grass green and dotted with flowers. The game logo is mostly golden, with the O being an illustration of big blue round sails. End ID]

I want to put this whole review under the fact that I bought this game on sale for less than 5 Euro. There will be a lot of bitching, and many things I would not accept with the non-sale price, but it was cheaper than a pizza and kept me busy for over 25 hours (though I admit, I am not the fastest, so I think <20h is realistic).

In Yonder, you are trying to find out about your past when your ship sinks and you end up stranded on an island threatened by the murk - some kind of dark fog blocking areas. Only you can see and befriend the small creatures called sprites which you need to clear the murk, progress the story, and finally discover the (very surprising! :o not) truth about your past.

On your way to do so, you have to gather resources, barter for goods, tame animals, catch fish, and discover secrets.

[ID: Screenshot of the game. The player character is overlooking a vast landscape with a huge mountain in the far background, surrounded by a pink forest. Trees closer to the player are green instead, and the landscape sports many cliffs and an ocean on the right side of the picutre. The sky is mostly blue, with a few pinkish-white clouds. Some kind of whale-shaped animal is floating in the distance between the clouds. End ID]

The positives:

Save whenever, good autosaves, multiple save slots.

Customize character with hair and eye colors, but also body shapes! Yay.

Lots of clothes to discover as well.

Cute animals to tame <3

If you have 2 of the same animal on a farm, there will be a third, baby version, it's so adorable.

Very relaxed, stress free gameplay. No combat, no death, drowning ports you back up on land.

The quest log is very detailed and works as a marker on the map, too.

Tons of things to discover, and very clear progression indicators.

I really liked the lighting in this game. Beautiful sunrises <3

Two modes of fast travel - from farm to farm for a (small) cost, and from one sage stone to any of the others once their quest is cleared.

Big inventory, early unlocked stash.

Some beautiful, diverse biomes.

Keyboard controls can be rebound.

Plays perfectly on the steam deck.

[ID: Another screenshot. The player character is gliding over a purple forest while hanging onto a rainbow colored umbrella. Underneath the character is a settlement with purple buildings, what looks to be an observatory and a giant planet model. The landscape in the distance is covered in fog and tinted with warm sunlight. End ID]

The neutral:

Short, lackluster story. This is not a game I bought for the story.

Farming is very basic. There's 4 different crops, a couple different animals to tame, and you can plant trees, which only give you the same wood you can find all over the place. It's not a farming game, though, so whatever.

The foxes are adorable but don't give anything unique. Some produce items that are harder to get, which is nice.

The game is a bit inconsistent whether a quest will use up your items or not. All the clothes you have to find for the scarecrow you get to keep, while other items get used up.

Hell, you can BUY tools, even though you get every single on for free and they cannot break, get lost, or get dropped. Why tf? I played the whole game having 2 sickles, unable to get rid of one of them.

Crafting is an over complicated, horrible UI, convoluted mess. Why is this in neutral?

Because you can buy pretty much everything. You can break rocks for days and then spend several minutes crafting ever increasing intermediate steps to get a bunch of stone pillars and arches - or you return for a few days and just buy them.

There is no money, so you barter with goods matching prices, which is a bit annoying. I ended up paying everything with potatoes and grass.

With a bit of patience and luck, you can even buy every fish, and it counts for the fishing collection, which, thank you, fishing is annoying.

Very short ingame calendar; a year is 30 days, so each season only lasts 7-8 days.

[ID: A screenshot of the game's crafting menu. It shows available recipes for the profession Constructor, with things such as stone arches and pillars, farm buildings made from stone, various metal ingots, and a set of profession specific clothes. End ID]

The negatives:

(Aka things that made me want to throw my deck at the wall.)

Jumping sucks. If you're standing wrong against a rock, jumping will make you jump back instead of up, which might lead to you falling off things. Luckily, very little jumping is actually required.

You can't select a hairstyle when creating the char, you find them all over the place. Default hair is ugly af. If I hadn't found a cute one pretty soon, it would have been WAY less fun staring at an ugly blob of polygons for 20 hours.

Similarly, you get some basic hair colors and can unlock super fancy ones in the game. Now why is this negative? Because not all default colors exist as shampoo, and I was so happy to find a perfect hair color when making my char, which I would have never gotten back, so I couldn't use any shampoo :(

The. Sounds. This game has some of the most grating, repetitive, ear-bleeding sounds I have ever had the displeasure of encountering in a game. Usually, I would turn off sounds nothing much lost, but:

The. Cats. There is a quest to find 55 cats in this game, and the only way to find them is to have sounds on, because they mew very loudly when you get close - or, I guess, seeing a blob of tiny pixels hidden away between rocks and trees 55 times.

Speaking of the cats. Some of them only appear at certain times, like winter, spring and summer nights, or even summer sunrise. In my opinion, this makes finding them without the wiki tedious; perhaps possible, definitely not worth it.

The only good point about the cats is that there's more cats in the game than you need, so there is a chance you find enough of one breed on your own.

Day/night cycle from 6am-6pm and vice versa, with no way to skip time. Which means for half of the game time, it's annoyingly dark. Makes it extremely hard to see anything, hey, at least you get a lantern. Which bugged once leaving me with a pitch black screen. Its just not fun. It would have been fine if nights weren't 12 hours long.

I would have turned my screen brighter, but days are extremely bright in comparison - even after turning down bloom.

Thunderstorms, especially at night. They just flash the whole screen white in irregular intervals, it's horrible. Once or twice, I had to put the deck down and wait until they were over. Luckily, they were rare.

[ID: A screenshot of the game, showing the player character in front of one of the sage stones; a giant face made out of stone, mouth wide open, mouth and eyes glowing brightly. It's sitting on an uphill slope on a snowy mountain with a huge cliff face to the left. End ID]

There were a few minor bugs; the aforementioned missing lamp during one night, I somehow completed a quest twice and got two badges, and the UI for board quests if you talk to the quest giver NPC without the items present is so bad I consider it a bug. Nothing gamebreaking.

Why do I still recommend it? Well, it was fun. Mostly. It was a real "couldn't put it down" game for a week or two, just one more quest, one more creature. It was less fun to have the game running for 2 real life hours waiting for next winter because I was missing one single cat and had nothing else left to do.

It's also a game I will happily uninstall and never touch again now that I 100% it, which, honestly, is nice, I have enough games to return to. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a way to hide the interface for better screenshots (though you can try to catch the split second before opening inventory or compass.)

If you like low-stakes, cozy games, this one might be for you - but on sale. If you're sensitive to flashing lights, beware of the thunderstorms.

[verbrannt74]

[acornbringer]

Why do I feel so connected with glow-in-the-dark skeletons? Is it because I'm a 90s child 🤔

You can support my work by becoming a patron 🎊

patreon.com/acornbringer

[everydaylouie]

Art Block

[beebfreeb]

To all my long-term followers: You have to look through all of my art and deduct exactly what's wrong with me. I know you can do it by now.

[otterloreart]

Princess Celestia in Generation 1 My Little Pony toy style

I saw a video of someone customizing a toy pony into princess Celestia and it made me think about what Celestia would look like if fully designed in g1 style. The video was using a normal pony body in Firefly pose, which has the same chubby roundness as the rest of the ponies. Obviously it was really cute and a great custom but I wanted to make my own version!

This is the Celestia pony compared to the "Buttons" pose pony I made previously.

She's much taller, obviously, to match the show. She has tinsel in her hair to match the Princess Ponies from g1 but also 4 colors of hair.

Her body type is more similar to the g1 Pony Bride + a little bit of the Sweetheart Sisters.

To match the fact Celestia has bigger wings, this version has 5 feathers on the outside and 4 on the inside instead of 4 and 3.

And of course the unicorn horn is several segments taller.

She is also technically very pale pink.

[lupucs]

Super Rude Busters! 👊💥 Wanted to try a pixel-based look this time with Blender using this add-on!

Music: 8-Bit Crisis by HydroGene

[nannerism]

Hello hello! I come bearing gifts! (a gift, rather!) (gift? fanart? same thing? I do not know!)

I give you @eechytooru 's ƎNA Wally design! I absolutely adore him and he was very fun to work on, and surprisingly, fairly easy to rig!

I did leave out his snake! and his apple, since truthfully I just did not want to model them ... But I had an idea instead! Here is him with ROBLOX accessories instead! (compensation, maybe?)

@:)

[purplepixel]

I have this fascination with putting the rise characters into 2012. So here's my attempt with rise donnie

[natsumipocket]

A cute glowing butterfly came over to say hi ˙˚∘⊹ʚɞ

[cry-ptidd]

Father Anderson

[canisalbus]

i decided today was as good a day as any other to learn how to 3d sculpt and then trace and animate the model…

so i made a little machete to spin in my head

(i still want to fix the snout length a little so it looks consistent, but i feel like it’s a pretty good first attempt at this)

hope you have a nice day and nicer ones to come! :)

.

[hylwicks]

oh hey by the way!! I did a scene for rise reanimated I'm thankful they let me put a personal spin on it hehe

[figofswords]

something something echoes of wisdom but instead of plastic it was toon. ok bye

[squidsqwag]

LETS GOOOOOO

[janpiki]

Kiwi²!

Look at this guy