Full disclosure: I have played a few hours of Yonder but not completed the main quest. I think I’ve seen what I’m going to, though, and most of what the game has to offer.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles starts well. Your dude (or dudette) is on a ship, gets a little bit of story about some ancient curse on the island he's headed towards, and then bam, shipwreck, wake up in a cave, meet a neat little sprite dude, and you're off into a beautiful world. It reminded me a bit of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (and a bunch of other games) in that you wake up, climb out of the tiny starting area, and are presented with a gorgeous vista to explore. See that mountain, you can go there, that sort of thing.

Yonder is also like Zelda in that there's a ton of random stuff to gather in a world teeming with life, and a lot of openness in how you approach the game outside the main quest. There are a few roadblocks you'll need to clear but you can mostly go anywhere and do anything when you're done with the tutorial.

But Yonder is not like Zelda. It’s not like almost any game I’ve played. It is, in fact, kind of a busywork simulator. It takes all the boring stuff you usually do to make the fun stuff easier/more fun (like gathering materials and crafting to improve your weapons, or farming and mining to build your cash reserves) and says “Here. That’s the game.”

Yonder is a game for people who love fetch quests. It’s a game for people who like exploration without challenge or reward. It’s a game for people who like collectathon platformers because of the collecting, not the platforming.

It’s not that Yonder doesn’t have good attributes, because it does. The game looks nice. Your character moves at a decent clip and all the areas in the game have distinct aesthetics and are compact enough to get through quickly. The problem that arises is that there just isn’t enough to do, and there isn’t enough to motivate you to do it.

The game’s activities are simple and shallow. You can fish, but the fishing game is at the level of Animal Crossing, without that game’s museum or bell economy to motivate you. You can farm, but all that gets you is barter and crafting items. You can gather and craft things and…none of it is mechanically interesting or inherently fun. It’s busy work for the inherent reward of busy work.

Yonder’s story is simple and boring, and while the world has lots of characters, few of them are interesting and all of them are shallow. There’s a comedian girl who is searching for an epic joke and a scientist girl who talks about animals, but those are about as memorable as “characters” get, and they are not sketched in beyond those basic character traits. Everyone else just gives you trading advice or fetch quests. You can hire people to work on your farms (through feeding them, since there’s no money in Yonder, which is a very bad choice I’ll explain later) but all that does is keep you from having to pick up animal poop and do the harvesting yourself. If Yonder had a compelling story or interesting characters you wanted to help it might give a little flavor to the bland and repetitive gameplay, but it doesn’t. When you arrive at the first town a simple text screen tells you that the townspeople greet you warmly and you have a nice stay overnight. When you meet the guy who is meant to help you fix the eponymous cloud catcher he basically just says “we need to fix the cloud catcher” and that’s it. It has all the flavor of a salt-free saltine. It has all the depth of a crepe. It is as engaging and enticing as a used gum wrapper lying in a gutter.

But even though there’s not much to do in Yonder the things there are to do are a hassle and really inconvenient. The game has multiple fast travel systems but one can only be used at night and the other requires solving simple fetch quests to active the “spokes,” which are inconveniently placed. Unlike in Zelda or Horizon Zero Dawn you cannot just warp to the places you’ve accessed, you need to find a stone mouth to go into, load into the hub area, and go through another mouth to emerge at the other end. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s annoying when you need to run back to your farm to drop items off…because the game has limited backpack space.

That’s right. Yonder, a game about gathering things, limits your backpack space. Significantly. It’s not a tiny inventory but it’s small enough that if you try to pick up all the stuff you come across in the game you will fill it up quickly. You can store some of this stuff in a chest at one of your farms, but this means running all the way back to a location that may be a few minutes from an unlocked fast travel point. The farm also has limited storage for unknown reasons, so eventually you will fill that up, and while Yonder has trading it has no currency. You can “buy” things by trading items for them (and the value is denominated in a currency that does not seem to exist so you can balance your trades) but you can’t just sell your junk. This is a terrible design system. First of all, Yonder requires you to collect lots of junk for random quests, and you never know quite what you’ll need. You may run across a stone head that requires you plant trees (meaning you need tree seeds) or a city where the guild master demands blueberries. Hope you didn’t throw your blueberries in the trash an hour ago! Secondly, Yonder has crafting materials that can only be purchased, not gathered or crafted. That means that you constantly need to keep valuable items on hand as a form of currency in case you need to purchase something. Letting you cash in items for in-game currency, like every other game, would make all of this significantly more convenient.

Eventually the combination of tedium and everything being a hassle leads to frustration. You just want to move the story forward on its glacial pace but doing so requires so much low grade busy work that, if you’re like me, you find yourself groaning at the screen and becoming irritable.

The game’s design also feels haphazard at times. One of the major side quests involves clearing “murk” (a purple mist) from areas. Your ability to do so depends on the number of “sprites” you’ve collected, but the number required can vary wildly within the same game area, with murk requiring 16 sprites to clear existing a few hundred feet from murk that requires only 5. There are also cats to collect, but many are just sitting on rocks out in the open. Shouldn’t they at least be a challenge to find or get to?

I couldn’t help but think of Knack, the launch PS4 title I recently played through, while I played Yonder. Knack is not a very good game, and its story and characters are insane, but I found it much more engaging and entertaining than Yonder. Knack may be too demanding for its aesthetics, repetitive, and weird, but at least it wasn’t aimless. Yonder feels aimless. Even the characters in the world don’t seem to care much about what you’re doing. They occasionally mention the murk or thank you for doing some chore for them, but for the most part they seem disinterested. After a few hours, so was I.

I understand the concept of a “chill” game or a “podcast” game and I get why for some people Yonder works for that, but I grew to dislike and resent this game over time. It’s just all the parts of other games that aren’t very fun. Many games ask you to do chores for rewards, be they cool weapons or bits of story. Yonder just asks you to do chores. If I’m going to wander around gathering stuff I might as well play Minecraft where I can build cool structures and discover underground temples and lava flows. Or just aimlessly play some Street Fighter Alpha 3, which is mechanically engaging and still looks nice after 20 years. Even recent walking simulators I haven’t liked haven’t annoyed me like Yonder did, because at least they had a story, even if it didn’t resonate with me.

Yonder is like digging through a box filled with packing peanuts, and nothing else. It’s like a sandwich consisting of two slices of white bread with no filling. It’s a dead end corridor where the only thing to do when you get to the end is turn around and go back.

Yonder feels like a game for very young children, except that it doesn't really have that aesthetic, it doesn't explain itself well, and some of its crafting systems are obtuse and complex enough I can't imagine a child not finding them both frustrating and inscrutable.

They made a beautiful world that’s not too bad to move around in, and they filled it with lots to do, but failed to add game mechanics or a reason to do any of it. It’s a shame, but most of all it’s really really boring.