[h1]A serviceable, yet contentious game.[/h1]
[b]Review as of Version 2.4.1 (No DLC) [/b]
Spirit City advertises as a [i] gamified focus tool. [/i] There is a lot of things going on in this game, but all of it is shallow and disengaging when looked deeper.
[h2]Sound and Music [/h2]
Audio is one of the few things I will give props to, as you can do afew things here. You can input your own music from your computer, and use a built in browser to access youtube for more music. The sounds vary from weather, ambient, and even background chatter if you so choose, giving you a good amount of customization in what you want to hear.
The problem with the music starts when you want to really control that experience. The music player will not go back to the last youtube page nor your last song you played when you closed. Instead, it goes to a default playlist every-time. This gives a disjointed experience where that you have to go into music panel and make redirect it to your music every-time you boot up the game.
You also can not save youtube pages, or playlist. You have to manually go to them instead of conveniently there. Oddly, they do seem to have this ability by saving several Lo-Fi girl videos for you to select, yet your own personal choice is not respected.
There are still failures even here. You only have ONE sound preset here. Say you want to have a winter storm and then switch to a summer afternoon rain preset, [b]you can not do that.[/b] You have to essentially write down or memorize that sound preset like it's 2001. This would be justified if the rest of the game had only one preset, [u]however both your character and room can have a FIVE preset options[/u], but the sound preset is just one.
[h2] Character Customization [/h2]
The character customization is female oriented, leaving very little room for male options. There is only one androgynous body type, which can be adjusted for hip/waist and body fat. Nothing is really going on for any other body parts here.
Being a guy, I am very focused on facial features, and the game lacks much here. You only have 8 beards, if you want to call it that. One is 5 o'clock shadow, a few of them are pencil beards. There is also only two to three mustaches, which is just barely serviceable. of the selections, there is only one fully facial beard that is decent enough to wear. There are no long beards, braided beards, nor anything that really would yield a viking nor a walk down Washington state in a hipster cafe.
Going further on facial hair, you only have one shade of color you can do here, where hair has two. This really feels by both the lack of options and color that it was more of an afterthought, rather than a feature.
[h2] Gameplay and Progression [/h2]
Actual engagement has a very dull and boring loop. Your main focus is to level up and get spirits, aka pets. Yet the rewards are heavily form over function, as the spirits don't do much, and leveling up is mostly logging in or doing an activity long enough to call one out.
Spirits are essentially furniture with eyes. You can pet them, but you do nothing else beyond that. They sit by your side as you do an activity, and that's it. there is no feeding, playing, nothing. They are just there. You can customize them, but only as preset options. You can't design nor edit colors for your spirits, giving some choice, but overall very limiting.
One big thing I seen commented is how people use this game in the background to help focus. If that is the case, why is there no option to change the monitor position of this game? At most is a borderless background, but moving between monitors would be essential for this.
[h2] Home decoration [/h2]
Housing is one of the bigger selling points the game offers. It is one of the stronger parts of Spirit City, as you can change decorations, items, wallpaper, furniture. It's very impressive, however you can't move anything around. So you overall have this dollhouse kind of feeling with the game. Serviceable, but not memorable.
[h2]Productivity Tools[/h2]
This is where I will be fully frank to say these are horrible to use. The game has several production tools:
[list]
[*] To-do List
[*] Journal
[*]Timer
[*] Habits (aka calendar)
[*]Clock
[/list]
All of these work. Yet again, serviceable yet lacking.
The the to-do list is decent, and nothing to really say much on. You set up list and mark when complete.
The Journal is insulting. You can not use [b]Rich Text like bolding [/b], [i] Italicization [/i], [u] and dare I say even underlining? [/u] These are things that even Mircrosoft Notepad has these features. I can't write up any defensible reason how or why they would even put this in the game in a state like this and never do anything to improve on this for the two years this game has been out.
Timer works with the huge caveat that the UI and learning curve for a timer is larger than you would expect. It has separate tabs for 'sessions' and just a plain old timer. Sessions can't be set to seconds, only minutes, and also give you XP if you notice it.
Habits is the calendar and scheduler here, yet it's a fight to just make it work. You default to see week, and ONLY the week viewing. You can't see it by month or year. This raises the question to why use this at all when even basic calendar programs give more options and choices than this feature.
Clock works and that's about it, right? No. You can't do analog for that classy feel, and switching from 12 to 24 hour format has to be done in the options instead of the clock itself.
[h2]Summary [/h2]
Spirit City barely has an identity, and can't really perform to execute it. Given the amount of DLCs for the game, we are long past it's functionality improvement phase and into flavor and aesthetics. They would need to do a serious QoL update at this point, because the base game is not impressive to me.
