There are a lot of games featuring dragons, but we’re fairly sure none of them are quite as adorable as Skye Tales. A relaxing, wholesome puzzle adventure that casts players as a helpful dragon, it’s a short but engaging affair that all the family are going to be able to enjoy.
As Skye the dragon, you’ll spend your time in Skye Tales helping the villagers of four quaint towns solve their problems. Each area offers up its own puzzles for you to solve, from vegetables that need to grow bigger to bells that need to be rung to help the coral reef around them flourish. You’ll only need to solve a key selection of each area’s puzzles to move onto the next. But if you want to eke more out of the game, there are plenty more challenges to complete in each area.
There’s nothing particularly taxing here, and if you do get stuck on any one of its puzzles (younger players might), Skye Tales has plenty of clues to help you along. You can complete things in any order, too: each area you visit is a small but beautifully-formed open world, filled with houses in the clouds, hidden caves and underwater caverns for you to explore at your leisure.
Perhaps it’s best described as a kid’s game, but we feel like Skye Tales’ final chapter – which only unlocks once the credits have rolled – has been designed for grown-ups to enjoy. While early puzzles in Skye Tales involve nothing more complicated than matching up shapes and sorting by size, the last chapter really ups the ante. There’s a complex light beam puzzle to get your head around, for example, along with more obtuse puzzles that require a bit more thought to figure things out.
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But even though the bulk of Skye Tales is far from challenging, it’s still been a delight to play through. This is chilled-out, relaxing gaming at its best, with no combat or progression barriers getting in the way. Exploring each level is a joy, made even better by the musical theme that runs throughout the game: you’ll find musical instruments dotted around each level that Skye can interact with as she flies past, from wind chimes to giant bells. Maybe you’ll be rewarded for interacting with everything in a level. Or maybe they’re just for fun: either way, making your own music as you drift around is absolutely wonderful.
It’s not completely free of frustrations, though. A handful of the puzzles can be a little infuriating to solve thanks to Skye Tales’ unwieldy controls. You’ll often need to turn wheels by simply flying Skye around in a circle and, while it’s fine for the most part, puzzles that require a bit more precision – like those afore-mentioned light beam puzzles – aren’t as enjoyable to complete as they should be.
It’s a minor complaint, though, in the grand scheme of things. Thanks to its lovely, whimsical art style – bright and colourful, and filled with cute, magical creatures – it’s hard to stay too annoyed at its odd pitfall. This is the sort of game that you play when you want to forget the stresses of everyday life, and for the most part, it does a very good job of doing so.
Skye Tales is an easy game to recommend; both for younger players and for adults who want an easy-going, cosy game to spend an evening with. It’s short – you’ll be done in a matter of hours – but almost every minute spent in its colourful, joy-filled world will leave you feeling warm and fuzzy inside. It won’t appeal to everyone, with even the game’s hardest puzzles being rather straightforward, but when it comes to a game to relax with, they don’t get much better than this.
Skye Tales Review – GameSpew’s Score
