Jolly cooperation
I loved Journey, and the time has finally come for me to see if I’ll love thatgamecompany’s follow-up adventure too. Apple’s recently-added support for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers on iOS was precisely the push I needed to give Sky: Children of the Light a proper chance. So far, so good.
Sky always looked beautiful to me, but hearing complaints about touch controls and knowing the studio is planning PC and console ports was enough to keep me on the sidelines. Now that I can easily play Sky with a gamepad – and there’s new content to explore thanks to the recent Season of the Lightseekers update – I figured it was time for a long-overdue check-in. You should consider doing the same!
Certain aspects of Sky aren’t as striking as they originally were in Journey, but the overall feeling of sharing a sense of discovery and mindfulness with random players is no less powerful in 2019.
You’ll use a growing repertoire of nonverbal cues to communicate with strangers who can enter and exit your world at any moment. It’s a social experience through and through – an entirely positive one at that – but if you want to try to explore on your own, that can meditative and soothing in its own right.
Soaring around gorgeous islands in the sky, lighting candles, searching for spirits, and tagging along with other players to see what they’re getting up to – it’s all so very wholesome. Sky is my new nighttime wind-down game, at least for the next couple weeks. It leaves me feeling warm inside.
I can absolutely sympathize with everyone who struggled to cope with Sky‘s original controls. Having tried the touch scheme out of curiosity, I don’t think I would’ve stuck with the game if that been my only option. But with gamepad support, Sky feels more or less how I imagined it would coming off of Journey. I’m sure plenty of you will want to wait for the PC or console versions (or maybe even Android), but if you happen to have a phone mount or a comfortable tablet setup, honestly, it’s pretty dang nice.
The fact that it’s free-to-play in a non-overbearing way certainly helps.
