This game has great vibes and great atmosphere, but its over-reliance on combat is puzzling. Because, well, the combat in this game ****. It's clunky and unresponsive. Almost as a mockery, you are given a slingshot as your first weapon, which will get you through the first area in the game, but once you enter the woods and you have to fight back against several powerful enemies at once, well, the combat quickly goes from mildly irritating to hugely irritating real fast. I would've really enjoyed this kind of game with focus purely on exploration and npc interactions because as an action game Northern Journey just doesn't work. And, I know it's a weird thing to bring up when talking about an indie game, but the optimization is far from great. This game has graphics straight out of 2002, and my PC far surpasses the system requirements, and yet even though I was getting a silky smooth framerate, my computer was heating up and humming like crazy. Not cool.

Great atmosphere and simple adventure gameplay held back by an incredible amount of jank and bugs. I would really love to say, that I enjoyed every minute of The Northern Journey, it has amazing world building and even better level design. The quests are simple enough and aren't overly complex and the look of the environments is outstanding. However, the combat is not just bad, it's terrible. Hitbox issues, enemies that move too fast and take way too much damage before dying and boring, slow weapons sadly make this a journey not worth taking. Bosses are an absolute chore and defeating them is basically up to chance. They usually have unavoidable attacks and weird hitboxes. Gameplay comes to halt during boss fights, they are just overly frustrating and tedious to fight. The rest of the game works so well, the combat is simply bad.

This game is indescribable, you need to play it yourself. Graphics, music, gameplay, everything in this game is combined and creates an absolutely mesmerizing atmosphere.