A very short game, less than 20 minutes long.
The framing story is very beautiful, but mostly comes through cutscenes, with only a few touches in the action itself (such as the response to examining oneself, or to taking the pole).
Most of the game sticks to sparse, utilitarian descriptions. This strikes me as the wrong choice: that premise would lend itself better to lavish scenery and slow discovery of lore about the spirits: we never do find out very much about them, or how the various obstacles relate to their plots.
This might be due to interface constraints: an image and the status bar take up most of the screen, leaving little room for text, and the scrollback is frequently cleared. I often found this frustrating.
In contrast, the writing style of the intro and outro is lovely, and matches the beautiful art perfectly. However, the font is hard to read, and the line height should be higher (150% looks good on my screen).
Most of the puzzles are somewhat too simple and lock-and-key. Multi-step puzzles that require understanding the setting would be more fun and improve immersion. I loved the river, and the cat puzzle was also a good one.
The game is quite badly in need of synonyms: “cat” for “wildcat”, “birds” for “magpies”, “stone” for “outcrop”. This is especially frustrating since Adventuron’s default messages for unrecognised tokens make it unclear whether my action was uninteresting, or used the wrong noun.
The music is quite nice, but quickly grows repetitive.
Excellent response to “xyzzy”, but no response for trying to pet the cat.