2 people found this review helpful
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 127.6 hrs on record (126.3 hrs at review time)
Posted: 13 Jul, 2024 @ 6:18pm
Updated: 27 Oct, 2025 @ 10:55am

Early Access Review
I have a lot to say, and the first warning I can give you - this game is extremely deceptive and excels at pulling into its grasp very quickly.

TCG is very reluctant in fixing bugs that are related to game mechanics, but fix candle dupes in the matter of days. That should be enough for you to understand how this company works.
The following is the more thorough and descriptive review:

Starting with good aspects of the game:
Overall, it's a very pretty and chill social game that's designed to be enjoyed with friends/finding them in game, but can freely be played solo. You can interact with other players, emote and fly together. The artstyle is very nice, it runs exceptionally well at almost any hardware, and the graphical fidelity is also enjoyable, despite the fact that the game came out more than 5 years ago.
It has a story. It's not much and it's quite hidden at times, but it is there, and maybe you'll enjoy it.

Unfortunately, this is where the good stuff mostly ends.

It's a live service game. And it's a VERY GREEDY live service game. Never before have I encountered a season pass without any options to catch-up on the progress, in case you had to stop playing/bought the season pass late. This game will demand daily playtime from you. It will not be much, mostly 15-30 minutes if you're not willing to put yourself through the grind, but you WILL HAVE TO log in every day, otherwise you will miss out on the season pass' currency that you will NEVER be able to get back (unless you spend money).

The cosmetics - since it's a social game, it also heavily revolves around character customization. And while some improvements to this system have been made recently, the amount of time you will have to put in just to unlock a decent wardrobe for yourself is INSANE.

The game features currency known as candles. There are two types of candles - seasonal and regular. You earn seasonal candles by doing daily tasks (4 every day + 1 to collect while roaming in the world) and you can earn an additional one daily, if you're an owner of the season pass. Regular candles are collected by lighting up candles around the areas, and you can only get 20 per day. Every 5 candles per day, your "multiplier" of acquiring candles will reduce, slowing you down and forcing you to spend more time (there is something known as a Candle Run in the community). 20 candles will require around 2-4 hours to be collected, depending on your skill and area knowledge.

I will not go too much further into detail, but the amount of candles you will need in order to comfortably unlock different cosmetics will go into thousands very quickly - there are many permanent spirits which require hundreds of candles each. There are also returning spirits, which are the old season pass cosmetic spirits, that return every two weeks for people to acquire cosmetics they couldn't earlier.

The problem? One spirit visits Sky every two weeks, while there are dozens of old seasonal spirits in total. Just two weeks earlier there was a "return" (for the first time ever) of a spirit, from a season that happened TWO YEARS AGO. And it was just one spirit, each season usually has 3 or 4 of them.

This spirit also required you to spend around ~160 candles to unlock everything. Just from this single spirit. That is 6 days of full candle collection. So, you're left with three options - grind every day for a LONG time, lose out on cosmetics, OR... open the store page. 15 candles is around 5$, I'm sure you can do math yourself.

There are many nuisances that I haven't covered here, like collab seasons that you may never find out about, unless someone directly tells you about them, or shows you how to access them. They also feature spirits with cosmetics, with prices that are even more egregious (150 candles for a single hair style). Or something knows as Hearts, which is another currency that's even more difficult to obtain, and it also can't be bought (technically).

There are also exclusively paid cosmetics that show up sometimes for a limited amount of time. Does 20$ for a hair style sound fair? I don't think so.

TLDR - this is a trap that demands daily engagement and long-term commitment. Be prepared to be overwhelmed by the amount of cosmetics (because this is mostly what the game is about nowadays) that you may never get. If you're brave enough to get into Sky, make sure to at least bring a friend or two, because not many people are very social. It has become their daily grind and their job, not a place of relaxation and socialization.
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