Imagine what it would be like if someone took a game in a similar vein as Harvest Moon, or Stardew Valley, and made it a fully 3D world with a beautiful art style. Indie development team Prideful Sloth have accomplished just that with Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles. Prideful Sloth is a Australian trio of developers, made up of a former Activision producer, a Rocksteady artist and a Rocksteady programmer. Well-known titles they’ve worked on include games like The Elder Scrolls, DmC: Devil May Cry, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and Rome: Total War. In their own words, they are “taking a micro-AAA approach” to creating games like Yonder with exceptional quality standards that meet their previous works.
Yonder places you on the enormous island world of Gemea, a formerly prosperous land plagued by what appears to be a malevolent miasma, which can only be dispelled by helping out the residents across the various towns. Completing tasks for the inhabitants, like fetching materials and using crafting professions, rewards you in ways such as granting you resources or land to start off a new farm. The farming is optional, as are the professions, but the more you do, the more you’ll get out of it. For now, there doesn’t seem to be a deep relationship system in which you can court or even marry someone, which is admittedly disappointing. However, the focus here is on the world itself and exploration, as well as getting rid of those boundaries so that you can go even further. The environments certainly do look gorgeous, as you’ll see from the screenshots and trailer below. Yonder does have a day and night system as well as seasons in it, so you can see for yourself what it looks like under different conditions. There are eight kinds of environments to be found in Yonder, from grasslands to snowy tundras and all sorts of things in between. You can tame the wildlife for your farms by feeding them their favorite foods, and leading them back to your land. This game has some pretty adorable critters, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself trying to domesticate as many as you can.
Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is expected to release on PlayStation 4 and PC in Q2 of 2017.
