However many hours Steam says I have, add another 700+ from my Switch version of the game. I've been playing for about a year and a half now, almost two years.

This is a very fun game! At first. The sad truth is that once you've played through the game once, maybe two or three times, there's not a lot of things to do if you don't have friends. I'd recommend giving Sky a try, but not devoting too much time to it. The only reason I still play this game is simply to hang out with my online friends.

This game is uniquely predatory in that you can customize your character with the plethora of cosmetics BUT it is incredibly time-consuming, grindy, and overall not very fun to do. Cosmetics are purchased with the in-game currency called candles, but this currency is also used for every other thing in the game, INCLUDING making friends with other players. Without intentionally collecting the wax to forge candles, you can expect to earn maybe 3-5 candles a day. Most players will hit the soft cap of 15 candles, and if you really want to exhaust yourself you can hit the hard limit of 20 candles- but this requires at least two hours of dedicated collecting, usually closer to three. I highly don't recommend doing this because it's such an easy way to fast track into burnout. In the past few months especially I've come to feel that this game feels far more predatory than Honkai Star Rail, a literal gacha game made by Hoyoverse. HSR gives out their in game currency far more liberally than Sky COTL does, and their daily quests take up far less of my time, and that alone should be enough to turn you away from spending money on this game.

Then there are some cosmetics that are only available by spending money on the game. At a surface level this might seem fine, but the pricing is atrocious. Most are sold as single cosmetics, and can cost upwards of $25 USD for, again, a single cape. If you're from a country that has a currency weaker than the USD, tough luck: there is no regional pricing and the devs have stated themselves they have no intention to implement it. The vast majority of cosmetics are also seasonal, to cash in on that sweet sweet FOMO. They return every year, but only for a period of two weeks at a time. There's additionally a $10 battle pass which is the ONLY purchase worth making imo, but more often they lock all the worthwhile and prettiest cosmetics behind the pass, turning it from a nice option to mandatory. The battle pass doesn't even give these cosmetics to you for free, but instead you have to grind out daily quests to earn the special seasonal candles to unlock the items in the battle pass, with a hard cap of 6 candles per day. If you opt not to play for too many days in the season then tough luck! You wasted your money and you can't get all of the cosmetics. These cosmetics in the battle pass will still come back later for regular candles at least, but be prepared to wait at least two years for the spirit to come back, and always with the prices vastly marked up. It almost feels like RNG to get your hands on these cosmetics, because they will only come back for a singular weekend. If you miss your chance, you have to wait another two years before they'll come back again. This is assuming you can earn enough candles to purchase their cosmetics in the first place, as the vast majority of spirits cost over 100 candles to buy everything, and the average cost of all of these spirits is 163 candles (which I did in fact do the math for). Some of the more expensive spirits are nearly 250 candles! If you hit the HARD daily cap of 20 candles, it still takes you over a week, on average, to earn enough money to buy all of the cosmetics from a spirit. At three hours a day, that's a full 24 hours of playing this game to earn enough candles for a single spirit's cosmetics.

If you do have friends and decide to play together, contrary to how the game might advertise itself, there's not a lot to do together. You can explore the world, but there's little depth to the activities you can do. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are playing the instruments together (which has a very confusing system that doesn't feel intuitive to many players in the slightest), and a pong-type ball game that feels like a worse version of any kind of virtual sports game. Otherwise, you're restricted to wandering aimlessly around the very pretty backdrops and little else. Most of the quests in the game are single-player and very basic tasks that feel repetitive and boring after a while.

Becoming friends in the first place costs that oh so valuable currency, and grows exponentially more expensive the more emotes you go up the tree (with the topmost emotes currently costing 30+ candles). Chatting with your friends is not unlocked by default unless you use the confusing friend code system to become friends. Otherwise, you have to spend ~10 candles to be able to chat in-game. You're better off chatting over Discord instead however, because the game's filter has the strangest bans. You can't swear which is fine, but you can't say words like Discord or Gay. Sometimes it will say you sent a bad message just because you said a word with a banned word in it. I don't think I would mind this decision as much if the chat weren't locked behind an in-game "paywall" and NOT VISIBLE TO OTHER PLAYERS. Yes, only you and your friends who you have intentionally unlocked chat with are able to see the words you say! Oh and if you decide this isn't a deal breaker, expect to be randomly split into different servers for no reason at all every hour. My one friend even has a bug that shows them as offline despite them clearly being on, so I can't even rejoin their lobby if we get split, and this bug has persisted for at least three months.

This is all mostly without even mentioning the plethora of bugs that range from minor to literally game breaking, which are fixed on a sliding scale from "a week after the bug is discovered" to "literally never lol". There have been multiple bugs in the past year that break the game to a degree that it is literally unplayable, though admittedly the compensation for those bugs were better than average. Most server maintenance doesn't take the server down entirely, instead warning players in the official Discord that there may be instability: there is no in-game announcement that server maintenance is occurring. There's also no compensation for any maintenance whatsoever, even if they take the servers down. Even HSR offers compensation for server maintenance.

There's so much more criticism I could give to this game on top of this. I love this game so so much, and so many people I know love this game so so much, but this game suffers so terribly from management that often feels like it doesn't care about players voices, bugs that go unchecked for far too long (sky is a functioning game we commonly joke), a severe lack of things to do with your friends, and a predatory feeling that rivals literal gacha games if you want your avatar to look even halfway decent. The Journey cape set you see in the advertising costs more than the actual game Journey costs. If you want a set of beautiful scenery to explore and a vague story that's deeply emotionally resonant, I'd highly recommend playing Sky! What I don't recommend is sticking around after that. If the game feels boring or grindy, then leave. We won't be offended if you do.

unga bunga ? bungaaaaaaa bunga darkkkkk !!! bunga lites up candle ! bunga save bunga earned currency ! Bunga happy dances unga bunga revives fallen star bungas and helps them to reach heaven (if im not wrong ☝️🤓)
pretty good game , there's a lot bugs but thanks to them can skip some areas 🗿
call your bunga to game carry him on your shoulder and enjoy

Keeps randomly saying I disconnected but I can still see everyone moving around just fine. It's annoying because the pop up message box interrupts whatever you're doing