The adventure game Sky: Children of the Light is now available on the Nintendo Switch. MeinMMO author Irina Moritz thinks it is a little gem that friends of cooperative games should try out.
This is Sky: Sky: Children of the Light is a free open-world adventure game that was released in 2019 for iOS devices, later for Android, and now also for the Nintendo Switch. The game has a strong focus on exploration and especially social elements and interaction with other players you encounter in the world.
You play as a child exploring a kingdom in the sky. Once it was a great land where spirits lived peacefully in the clouds. But something happened and darkness came.
It is now up to you to find out what happened in the kingdom and awaken the spirits from their slumber. To do this, you travel from one area to another, experience the stories of the spirits, learn new emotes from them and can earn cosmetic items.
I played Sky: Children of the Light on the Nintendo Switch and spoke with Game Director Jenova Chen from Thatgamecompany about his game. Here are my experiences with it.
Just like Journey, yet completely different
This is the gameplay of Sky: When I logged into Sky for the first time, I experienced a kind of déjà vu. The cutscenes, the animations, and also some of the gameplay mechanics immediately reminded me of Journey, another popular game by Thatgamecompany.
- The flying ability works similarly to Journey: You collect light fragments that allow you to fly higher and further
- The story is partly told through murals and environmental storytelling
- The spirits are all much larger than your own character, reminiscent of the ancestors in white from Journey
- At the end of a level, you sit down with your fellow players in front of an altar and watch a cutscene together, just like in Journey
In a comparison video, you can directly see the similarities, but be careful, the video contains spoilers.
The differences from Journey mainly lie in additional gameplay elements that Sky has to offer. You start in a small hub which is your home and explore the large world of the game from there. At the start of your journey, you receive a candle that never goes out. You can use it to light other candles or torches that are scattered throughout the world.
To progress in the world of Sky, you must seek out slumbering spirits and awaken them by touching them with your candle. Although it sounds simple, the search for the spirits can get tricky. They are often very well hidden or located in initially unreachable places.
To thoroughly search an area and find all the secrets and spirits, you need to play it multiple times after you have collected more light fragments and can fly higher. Of course, the more spirits you have found, the better.
The candles are needed for almost all interactions in Sky and are an important currency within the game. When you light red candles or burn evil plants on your way, you collect light fragments. Once you have collected enough, you receive an additional candle and can store them in large quantities.
Relationships must be nurtured
The most important function of the candles is that you can use them to get to know the spirits and other players better.
This is how friendships work in Sky: If you really like a spirit or fellow player, you can deepen your friendship with them by giving them your collected candles. The first friendship level only requires one candle, but the costs increase further as you want to become closer friends. Just like in real friendships, one has to invest more and work on a relationship.
In my conversation with Jenova Chen, the director of Sky: Children of the Light, he told me the following about the relationship system:
The biggest breakthrough that I would attribute to Sky is the answer to the question: How do we handle more than one person at the same time? You know, when you put eight people in a room, conversations tend to quickly turn for the worse.
I would say that the biggest feature we developed for Sky is the trust-building system. You can’t just talk to someone because they are sitting next to you. You have to earn their trust and consent for them to say: “I want to listen to you.”
And then you can talk and let the friendship develop over time. In most RPGs, you level up yourself, but in Sky you increase your relationships with other people. I think this makes the players behave more like they do in real life.
Jenova Chen
The enhancement of relationships in Sky gains its significance due to the fact that candles are not abundant. If you want to have them in large quantities, you either have to collect them painstakingly or lay down real money. Therefore, the selfless giving of candles to other players is a nice gesture, as it means giving up something of your own to bring joy to someone else.
- Candles are needed to unlock new emotes, spells, and buffs for your character.
- You can exchange 3 candles for a heart with every spirit in the game. It is the second currency in Sky needed for unlocking cosmetic content.
If you have built up your relationship with other players enough, you can initially hold their hands, give them a high five, and later even a hug. And at some point, you can also invest candles to chat with them directly. Initially, that is not possible. Basically, chatting in Sky is restricted and must be earned first.
Jenova told me during our interview:
The internet today is very toxic. It empowers all anonymous comments that say offensive things and they can get away with it without consequences. And so people who are cheeky and creative tend to say something really extreme. But if we actually want to simulate a real relationship, then there are consequences for you if you do that, right? People are socially held accountable. Let me give you an example.
Originally, when we launched Sky, people could leave small notes in the world, just a kind of text, little writings. And they often said something very inappropriate. […] But one day we said, what if we show the name of the graffiti artist? Who left these messages?
And then we observed how people would go online and try to delete the messages as quickly as possible because they did not want their friends to know they wrote that. And so Sky is like a combination of little designs that tries to hold people accountable for their social behavior.
Thus, you can quickly end a friendship in Sky if a fellow player suddenly fires out insults in the chat or tries to grief.
The cooperative system in Sky: But even if friendships and interaction in Sky play a central role, they are still not mandatory. If you want to explore the beautiful game alone, you are free to do so. Jenova said about this:
Sky has a very relaxed co-op mode. We tried that in the previous season. We forced the player to cooperate with more than two people. There was an uproar in the community because many people just want to be the lone wolf.
And so we learned that we cannot force people to cooperate and we must create alternatives. So Sky can be played completely solo. There is no way for someone to hold you hostage as a griefer. It is a kind of subtractive design, so things that lead people to potentially act selfishly, like a griefer. We are trying to minimize them.
Generally, however, cooperation is encouraged, for example by allowing you to fly higher and further with a friend. It does not matter whether you befriend a stranger or bring one of your friends from another device into your session.
I experienced how well this works during my first gaming session when I became friends with a player named Moff Moff. We held hands for hours as we explored the different areas and discovered new secrets and spirits together, even though we never exchanged a single word during that time.
Together, we could reach areas in the game that I would not have been able to access alone. There was a locked door that required a second player or a flying upgrade located atop a tree. Alone, I did not have enough flying power to get there. But with Moff Moff by my side, it was no problem at all.
And when we uncovered a new secret together, there was a joyful high five, and later even a hug.
The friendship constellation that Moff Moff and I expanded
When spending money to make others happy
This is the payment model of Sky: Sky: Children of the Light is a free game and relies on an in-game shop and adventure pass to generate revenue. Since Sky is fundamentally a service game, players are regularly offered new content in the form of seasonal events.
The events bring new content in the form of:
- Additional quests
- New spirits with their own shops
- New gameplay systems like spells
- Additional areas or changes to old areas
- Limited-time cosmetic items that can be obtained through the pass
In addition, you can also purchase candles, which are used in the game for leveling relationships, in various quantities in the shop.
The developers pay close attention to ensuring that monetization feels fair to players. Jenova told me how he and his team went about it:
It is actually quite simple. Yes, we have experimented with many monetization models, and internally we have a moral compass. If I am a father and I take my child to this video game, and my child asks me to pay for this thing. Do I feel proud? Do I feel positive emotions when I make that payment, or do I feel like I’ve been manipulated?
If I feel that someone is manipulating my children, that is not honorable and respectful. So we always try to pay close attention to how it feels when you make a purchase. […].
This is how players spend their money in Sky: At the same time, there is also a connection to the gameplay system of giving candles. Giving to others is supposed to make players feel good or to have made someone happy. According to Jenova, this is also reflected in the purchasing behavior of Sky’s players.
[…] We focused on giving the player the feeling of being generous and altruistic because we want people to be proud of their expenditures. A large part of the revenue in our game comes from the season pass. But what we know is that about half of the season pass has been given away. About half of our revenue comes from buying gifts for other people, as there are many people in Sky who come from countries that are not necessarily very wealthy. But they have friends in richer countries. So players have been very generous in helping each other. And that is something I am very proud of in our community. […]
Players also like to participate in charity events. Jenova told me that the community pushed him and his colleagues to start a fundraiser for COVID victims.
They asked us to make a donation for COVID. And we quickly put together a pack for players, it was literally just a few flowers. And the players generated over a million dollars for Doctors Without Borders.
Sky on the Switch
The Switch release of Sky: Children of the Light made me very happy as a long-time fan of Thatgamecompany. Since I had not played the game on mobile platforms initially, it was the perfect opportunity for me to catch up on the omission.
Graphically, there is nothing to complain about Sky on the big screen. Although the game was originally developed for smartphones, it holds its own easily against other Switch games and looks beautiful thanks to the typical Thatgamecompany style. You can also choose whether to boost the graphics to 30 fps or prefer slightly weaker graphical performance at 60 fps.
Jenova Chen told me that several upgrades were made for the Switch version:
The graphics for the Switch are definitely much better. When we have to squeeze everything [effects and models] onto the mobile, it quickly gets too hot or doesn’t last long. But in docked mode on the Switch we have a pretty good-looking game.
We also upgraded the audio files so that we have surround sound on the Switch, which doesn’t make sense on a phone. We heavily optimized the game to make it run. It was a great technical challenge, but I am very satisfied with the results of our great development team.
Jenova Chen
The controls and user interface of Sky were also completely overhauled for the Switch. With the controller, the game plays like a normal adventure game, although the camera control can sometimes be clunky.
The only real downside for me was that the Switch version unfortunately does not offer couch co-op. This would fit perfectly with Sky. It would be nice if the developers could add this feature in the future.
This is how it continues in Sky: Make friends with the little prince
This is the new season: Shortly after the release of Sky on the Nintendo Switch, the latest season of the game started, revolving around the famous book “The Little Prince.”
Director Jenova Chen told me that this collaboration is particularly important to him and means a lot to him personally:
This is the first IP collaboration I have worked on in the 15 years of my career. But for me, The Little Prince holds a special place in my heart because it’s my favorite book. I wanted to take players on a journey into the world of The Little Prince and showcase the character inspired by the book.
We want players to befriend The Little Prince, hold hands with him, and play hide-and-seek. You can meet the adult characters or read The Little Prince’s comments, his philosophical discussions about life and adulthood. And truly create memories with him. We hope to leave an impression on all players.
The content of the season includes:
- A new area called Vault of Knowledge
- The Little Prince himself, with whom you can befriend
- New spirit NPCs
- Quests that follow the adventures of The Little Prince
- Light upgrades for the players’ wings
I have not played the season yet, but I definitely plan to because The Little Prince is a truly beautiful book. I am curious to see how the story has been implemented in the quests and think that Sky with its friendship mechanics is the perfect game for this collaboration.
At the end of our conversation, Jenova said to me:
I hope that with the success of Sky, more people will be interested in making games that are not about fighting. That’s my biggest hope, to influence the industry so that more people make games for more gamers out there.
And I hope for that too.
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