Seina: A Tale of Spirits is a fantasy adventure that tells the story if a girl who lost her beloved cat, Seina. The search leads the heroine to the strange lands, full of spirits and other amazing creatures. The project belongs to tje indie developer Argyro Brotsi, who drew inspiration from Ghibli art style and Japanese folklore. The game promises a cozy experience in the charming hand-painted world filled with magic.

Today, the game receives its demo version on Steam, opening the door to the spirit world to every player who wishes to give it a try. However, I had an honor to test the game out a bit ahead of this major event. Without further ado I can say that the game has both strong and weak sides, but still has great potential to become something truly special.

And now I’ll try to explain why I’ve come to this conclusion, sharing thoughts on my experience.

The demo version of Seina: A Tale of Spirits throws players straight into action. There is no intro cutscene or at least a story recap. The narrative of the game is mostly explained through the official Steam page. We start at the entrance to the spirit world, where the system begins to explain the controls and gameplay through action. Sadly, the tutorial is narrowed to the special pop-up windows, which explain the keys tied to the certain actions.

However, there are not that many actions the character can perform for now. In addition to the classic interaction with the objects, the girl can jump and use some special items like kite for short flying. Aside from that, the game doesn’t have any unique gameplay options to offer. It focuses on interweaving simple actions into environmental storytelling and puzzles.

The main course of the game is exploration, as players and the protagonist search for the lost cat. For this purpose the world is separated into smaller scenes, with their own story and tasks. Starting from the simple objective of receiving permission to enter the village, the player soon faces more grand problems like conflict between otter and owl tribes. To resolve all problems at hands, the game offers simple find-and-bring system. In short, players complete small tasks to receive items and subsequently exchange them for others until the main objective achieved.

This repetitiveness has the potential to become the main problem of the game. While demo is the short testing material, if the rest of the game follows the same pattern, players can soon lose the interest in gameplay if not the storytelling. However, this type of gameplay is still very appealing for those who seek simple relaxing experience, or the kids which are not ready for serious challenge.

The visuals are the part where the game truly shines. The creatures and heroine herself look incredibly cute, truly following the inspirational source. The entire world feels like a Ghibli reality. The soft lines and colors, many mysterious shrines and relaxing music – everything creates a peaceful atmosphere. It’s simply nice to explore the map and look around the objects and creatures, which look like little pieces of art.

While the game can engage the players only with the narrative and art, its technical state can kill the experience completely. For the players who try to run this game on a mid-tier system I’d strongly recommend going into the setting and set the frame rate limit right after launching it. With no frame-rate cap and DLSS on out of the box, the game tries to fry both processor and GPU starting from the loading screen.

This problems can also grow from the lack of optimization in both code and 3D graphics. Every object in the game looks extremely high poly with high resolution textures, shaders and post-processing applied. While it’s not a bad thing, with the lack of optimization in both code and other systems it can lead not only to lags and crashes but, god forbid, hardware problems. Indie developers often forget or don’t really think about this side of development, but I hope this beautiful adventure will receive an improvement to its technical side.

As a conclusion, Seina: A Tale of Spirits is a game that can appeal to both adults seeking peace and kids just starting their way in gaming. Perhaps it can even become a nice adventure for a cozy family weekend, where everyone enjoys the beautiful quest together. However, right now the game is still pretty raw and has plenty of room for improvement.

It has the potential to become a true gem, if the developers find some more interesting solutions to expand the experience and improve the performance. For now, it’s a beautiful creation of an artist, which still lacks some sharpening on more technical aspects.