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A slow-paced but relaxing board game elevated by beautiful visuals - Spiritle Quick Review

2K View2023-07-04

Spiritle

Turn-Based TacticsParty GameCartoonTurn-Based StrategyBoardStrategyAnimalCasual

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PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Despite Spiritle being a free-to-play game, I’m going to say pass on this one. The artwork is lovely and the simple rules allow for some neat little tweaks for each character, but the pacing is so slow that I found myself getting frustrated much more than I was having fun. At its core, Spiritle is about finding matching tiles on a randomly generated gameboard while using those matches to power attacks on other players, ultimately being the last player standing. I often had to wait as three other players looked for matches, made their attacks, and fussed over their decisions, just so I could take a stab at matching a pair of tiles—only to guess incorrectly and have to wait my turn again. It’s a bit of a drag.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played two hours of Spiritle, which was plenty of time to take in the tutorial, a few practice matches, and several rounds of the “classic” matchmade four-player versus mode. Spiritle also includes a co-op mode, as well as a mode for private games with friends. Each game of classic awarded me experience for my characters, as well as acorns to spend in the “Tree of Talents,” which provides bonuses to gold earned per turn, damage, and health.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Simple, expandable rules. Spiritle is a pretty easy game to learn, and I enjoyed the way its match-two system formed the basis for interesting tactical decisions when played against three others. To flip tiles, for example, I’d move my character to its location, and so I’d end my turn on whichever tile I flipped last. If that placed me next to another character, it might leave us both open to a special ability attack from another player, such as the fox’s “seeding” spell, which does two points of damage to everyone in a row of three tiles. I could visit the shop to pick up a damage bonus or healing item, but that would mean I’d only be able to flip over one other tile that turn—not enough to make a pair that allowed me to attack another character.

• Lovely artwork. Spiritle is rendered in a beautiful and natural-looking visual style, which unifies the characters, the menus, and the gameboard itself. I liked the way special mutator tiles appeared on the board, and the characters’ reactions to taking damage or finding a match. It’s just a very pretty little game to look at, from top to bottom.

WHAT SUCKS

• Painfully slow pace. Turns can take a long time in Spiritle when there are four players on the board. It’s not even that there’s a whole lot for anyone to do in a single turn. However, to end each phase, the active player has to click a confirmation button, and for me that led to a lot of time waiting for other players to remember they had to do that. Heck, I caught myself missing that step several times myself, so I’m not upset at anyone about it.

• Clunky, unclear interface. This was the real culprit, I think. Spiritle is certainly pretty, but the visuals often work to make the menus and inputs unclear. They introduce some confusion, too: certain tile types—volcanoes and sacrificial stones, for example—look pretty similar, especially when they’re partially obscured by a character. When I made a bad move because I’d mistaken one terrain type for another one and failed to get the match I had planned my turn around, it just felt bad.

• Tile-matching as a base mechanic. While I appreciate that making it PvP adds a certain amount of tactical depth, we’re still talking about a tile-matching game that works pretty much identically to the one I played on classroom tables in primary school. Fascinating as it was then, I just didn’t find it very interesting now, as an adult—especially given how long I had to wait between turns.

💬Will you be giving Spiritle a try, or is this charmingly animated magical forest one you’ll be leaving unexplored for now? Let me know in the comments.