Where the player completes the opening hours of Spirit of the North 2, when the stakes are fully established before the tranquility of platforming that had come before, there is this fade to black moment. Having not played the previous entry despite having bought it on a summer sale, what had come before had set a very convincing and straightforward tone. You play as a fox, explore beautiful lands, and then hit the next roadblock and need to find your way through. Simply Enough and reminded me of Okami.
That being said, the first few hours I had invested in the title weren’t all representative of the full game, once my character wakes up on the shores of a foggy moor and the game doesn’t say, but makes clear, that here is where the adventure is truly set to begin. This is the point at which a scope you do not expect from an 8-hour game begins to take form and stretch well beyond the expectations it sets for you. Spirit of the North 2 is a spiritual journey at its core, earning its name in the process.
The Foggy Moor
Spirit of the North 2 has beautifully crafted moments that depict its story, but in honesty, it spends so little time establishing the story that it took me a little time to catch up. The player takes the role of a fox who seems to be just relaxing and lounging around at the start of the game. From there, you are guided through the core gameplay mechanics that allow you to progress forward. The game doesn’t bog your screen down which so you have little to go on based on the objective, though when the game frees up, this becomes one of the best features. This road leads to a coliseum area that showcases just how grand these environments can be; however, up to this point, they are closed sets you can explore. These exist to prep you for how big the full world will be.
When you wake up on the shore, you a greeted with a full land of wonder to explore, unlock, and travel much bigger than the set pieces you had previously explored. The lack of screen clutter now fully allows you to embrace this environment, which takes cues from the foggy moors of Scotland, at least in the first portion. No matter where you travel, though, there is so much beauty to take in that the game might come to a stop just so you can bask in the tranquility. I know this was true for me.
Exploration in Spirit of the North 2 largely takes cues from games like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. It places an emphasis on puzzle solving, but how you discover the puzzles is largely up to the players. Main narrative locations have red smoke bellowing high into the sky to guide you, but between the fox and those locations are plenty of smaller locations that have minor upgrades, or lore texts, that can consume your time as well. In some of these cases, there might be very little indication where or how to begin, but the in-game map illustrates everything of interest to the player, so it’s hard to get fully lost, which feels like a real possibility, too.
The story, though not explaining much even in cutscenes, has the fox traveling across the land to quell several raging spirits of other animals. There really isn’t an argument for pacing to be had, as the game so early encourages the idea of experiencing, but the large world map is divided between smaller areas, and bosses tend to be the threshold to progress to the next area. When I had completed the fog-covered more, I entered a tower where I faced off against an owl so fully engulfed in pain. The fight takes place over several stores in which the owl flew around in the center, slamming his beak through open, and swiping his claws to harm my fox. Since the fox can’t attack, I needed to pull a lever that locked the owl in place and the pull spears that were protruding from the owl. Spirit of the North 2 presents acts of love and healing as the ultimate weapon. Your reward is emotional sequences between your fox and the spirits, left to wallow in the pain no longer.
A Fox and A Crow
Across the landscape are large-scale dungeons that the fox needs to traverse, with more comprehensive ones usually ending with an object that helps the player progress towards the next big bad they need to soothe. These can be pretty in-depth, requiring multiple puzzles or areas that need to be traversed. Thankfully, on your journey, you have a little crow companion to help you out. Together, you can traverse narrow paths or float up on wind tunnels to achieve the goal set before you. To aid this, the game also has a leveling system that allows the wolf to improve several of its skills. A drawback of this is just how sparse they feel, getting one at the end of a core dungeon in most cases, with them being rewarded for smaller puzzles as well, but the amount of time you spend between earning them is almost enough to make you forget they exist.
Similarly, there is a rune system that offers some slight alterations, but not enough to help you forget about that system as well. The most noticeable transitions that you find early on direct you to hidden items. This includes lore texts scattered through the land, or these floating wisps that can be used to unlock certain areas. These runes, at best, started chiming near where these items were located, but not with a distinctive change to suggest I was getting closer to my quarry. The coolest thing about them is that they change the glowing symbol on your little foxy friend, which I loved.
One of the weaker elements of solving puzzles is the traversal, which at times becomes a hindrance. This comes primarily in the form of the jump ability that you will use pretty much everywhere. Jumping is simple enough, but high jumps, to locations above your position, require a precise cursor to showcase that you can perform the jump. At one point, falling into a toxic pit, I had to fight the cursor to try to showcase so I could jump upwards to safety, but I wasn’t able to get it to stay long enough, and my fox was no more. Upon death, you drop a totem where you fell that you need to reclaim to get some materials back. It’s Dark Souls-esque, with the difference being that you always drop one, which gets confusing, going back to ones in bad situations like my fox died, only to realize you died again for the totem that had none. Totems will often drop in locations it is near impossible to grab and survive, which can create frustration.
On that note, dying can be frustrating in general, as it requires a lengthy scene to return to the respawn point. Multiple platforming segments can get a little tricky given that the jump mechanic and falling instantly kills you, making mistakes like that enough to force a lengthy traversal, redoing some puzzles, to return to where you died. Again, it comes across as Souls-like, but given the nature of the game outside of this, it feels like an out-of-place mechanic that isn’t fully needed. This can be compounded by the glitches present, with a common one that occurred for me being loading back in outside the bounds of the world. Dying from a fall can be doubly hard to swallow when that is your reward.
These aren’t the only glitches that I experienced, either, and as much as I don’t like to dwell on them, they were too frequent not to mention. Commonly, I would clip into a wall when a jump went wrong, and objects would occasionally not pop in properly as I wandered the vast environment. While not in the same vein, the camera also had some issues, becoming clunky in certain areas and unruly in others.
Verdict
Spirit of the North 2, is, at its heart, an indie title, which is where ideas and uninhibited ambition can live and thrive. Where creativity can bring about ideas, and bend worlds and experiences into something profound. At its heart, this is a story about love, about forgiving the past and freeing yourself of those binds. While there is no dialogue and minimal storytelling, this message still shines through, and at times, this approach makes it more hauntingly poignant.
At times, I did genuinely struggle with the need to restart after loading off grid, gritting my teeth at struggling to make the jump work properly during the moments it just wanted to fight me. But I did it. I needed to see it through, to the end of the road, to the catharsis, and that to me says everything.
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Review For PlayStation 5, also available for Xbox One, Xbox Series, and PC
A code was provided by Infuse Studio for the purposes of this review.
Developer: Infuse Studio
Publisher: Silver Lining Interactive, Merge Games
Release Date: May 9th, 2025
PROS:
+Beautiful Celtic World
+Haunting Story
+Great Dungeons and Puzzles
CONS:
-Jumping Mechanic
-Glitches and Bugs
-Respawn Mechanic
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Spirit of the North 2
