Once Upon a Spirit is a game that has more than enough potential to be an amazing experience, and is stopped by one thing only - it's too short.

The game basically has the setup for something much, much larger. It gives you a beautiful world that you really want to learn more about, but then leaves you off with only like one area. It left me wanting, wanting to see the human world from the perspective of these animals, meet more interesting characters and explore more of the spirit world. It feels like a demo for a game rather than a finished product, and damn it's a good demo, and damn do I want the completed game.



Straight off the bat, the game won over my heart with its beautiful aesthetics. The drawings are super cute, the pixel art is super crisp, and the backgrounds are honestly a joy to look at. The animations for all of your actions really add a further charm to the game and the characters (like the bouncing of the mosquito or the head tilts of the... fly thing?), and oh boy, the sound effects. I almost never comment on sound effects in a game, mainly because they aren't particularly important to me, but in this game, the sound effects were just simply brilliant. And the soft, mellow music really set the mood for a calm yet exciting experience.

The story has a lot of potential, but since it ends so abruptly, and with a cliffhanger, I could not enjoy it as much. The writing is GREAT. I absolutely loved the game's world and found myself very immsersed, as I already mentioned at the start of this review. I liked the twist ending a LOT, and it pieced everything together quite nicely. In fact, I played through this game twice, and I went ''oooooh so that's why'' more than a few times in my second playthrough.



The gameplay isn't that different from your general rpg maker stuff, but the intrigue of switching between the spirit world and the real world works really well, and offers a few really cool puzzles. Besides, I really liked the point and click-y gimmick the game had going on. It was also a very well polished game. I was not able to find any bugs, or anything that felt off, other than a few graphical incosistencies which I will get to in a second.

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Okay now I'm getting to it.

My only tiny little nitpick with the game (other than it being too short, obviously) is that the 2x2 pixel characters look a bit out of place in the 1x1 environments. I feel like the game would have looked so much better than it already does (and it already looks amazing) if everything in the game was 2x2. This could be achieved by halving the sizes of backgrounds and then making them twice as big. I tried it out with the screenshots, and I honestly think it looks just as good, if not better, considering everything's the same size now.

Here's the improved screenshots.



All in all, I really, REALLY want to give this game 5 stars, because I just absolutely loved it, but it was just too short for that. A lot of igmc games over the years have seen extended commercial releases, and I really really hope the same can happen for this game too - it's just too great to leave as this short 20 minute long experience.
I am leaving the review unrated for this reason. Lucy, dear, please, this game deserves much more ;.;