Spirits is a short name for little ghosts that pollinate plants in a magic forest.
This amazing puzzle game is in lower levels very easy to play and turned out in the last levels as quite challenging.
It reminds me most of Lemmings. You have either these special abilities like digging through walls (bashing), blowing other spirits over gaps or blocking wind streams as a bloated spirit which you can assign to each of them. Of course then its life is lost. The great aim is to bring as much as possible of them to the great magic swirl. Additional the spirits are reacting on windstreams but mostly they must be bewared of walking or floating into dangerous spikes everwhere. Dumb as lemmings ...
In a level each plant must be pollinated and a certain number of spirits must survive to solve the map perfectly. Your world rank is even breakdown to each level and will be permanently updated after playing. Not many people have seen the last levels it seems. And also the least achievements to make the last levels all perfect are quite rare. But lots of fun to do them.

A lovely little platformer in many ways. If you prefer a more relaxed style of play, this would be right up your alley.

Peaceful colors, peaceful music, cheerful little leaves waking up and walking in a most determined fashion towards certain doom, or possibly just a dead end that will make them knock into each other like they're in a zen mosh pit. Each of the spirits can be used in different ways to assist their fellows in escaping each level, a relatively stressless sacrifice unless you use too many of them and lose.

I LIKE.

Disclaimer: This review was written thanks to a copy of the game provided by the developer of the game, Spaces of Play.

Remember Lemmings, back in '90s? It was a genre-defining game, and one that has spawned countless clones and lookalikes. Now, in the 21st century, Spirits is a promising game that incorporates elements of Lemmings, but in a new and more vibrant way than other earlier games of its genre.

Spirits is simple by nature, with an A to B structure. There are no enemies, rather wind, spikes and cliffs will be your obstacles. You control a group of spirits, born from fallen piles of leaves. These spirits must reach the portal at the end of each level, to leave Autumn and find their way home. Each spirit can assist its siblings by digging, creating a breeze or building a new path. These actions all affect the spirits that come after it, and inevitably these abilities are what determines success or failure in each level. The ability to speed up the game often came in handy, especially when you finish sacrificing some of your spirits and wait for the rest of them to find their way to the end.

There are always a certain amount of spirits needed to pass the stage, and these can differentiate between a casual player, an a professional. As I strived to get as many spirits as I could into the portal, I saw my global statistics. I was often the world #1 on the easier levels, but that soon changed about halfway through. Plants are also found scattered through the maps, and these are essential to achieving that perfect score after your little floaty friends transport to their next challenge.

Spirits' art style is fantastic. Every level you pass has been hand-drawn, and looks akin to landscape scenes in Anime movies such as Spirited Away or My Neighbour Totoro. The beautiful silhouettes contrast against the vibrant reds, yellows and oranges, creating a warm glow like you're playing the game in front of a woodheater. The wind physics were especially lifelike, with tiny particles rushing past the spirits, glinging off sunbeams and swirling through corners. Everything in Spirits feels alive and realistic, even down to the tiniest things only a handful would notice.

The Glow Affect in Spirits was the only thing that turned me away. It is turned on by default, but when I first started up Spirits, the spirits felt blinding and ghostly. I understand that the spirits are meant the be, well, spiritual, but the power of the glow was too strong, so I had that feature turned off. Either way, the spirits looked fuzzy and warm, and their walking and flying animations all seemed carefully thought out.

All things considered, Spirits is a wonderful puzzle game, both in mechanics and in aesthetics. It's a mysterious, dreamlike and calming joy to play, and is a great break from the hectic action and fighting found in a lot of other popular games on Steam. I recommend this game to anybody who's up for a challenge, but at the same time wants a deviation from the norms of popular video games.

A frustrating puzzle game with tricky and ramping difficulty. A good game for puzzle enthusiast but everyone else should avoid it.

Fantastic little puzzle game. It's reminiscent of Lemmings, obviously, but has the extra element of wind affecting the spirits movement. At times, getting them to fly where you want them to go can be unintuitively tricky, but on the whole it's a great and addicting experience. Levels 30+ get quite challenging, so don't be scared to check a walkthrough.

My only criticism is the soundtrack. It's irritating and doesn't have any decent melody, though that's easily fixed by muting it and substituting your own.

There is a gameplay issue with this game. Every spirit won't react the same way, some flying lower than others for example. Because of that, you'll have to restart the levels again and again, which is everything but fun...

Edit: I just found out you in fact can assign commands while the game is paused with P key, so have that in mind when reading review. I'm also changing from 'not reccomend' to 'recommend' but leaving the rest of the review untouched.

In the beginning it looks promising - nice relaxing graphics and music, lemmings style gameplay, plenty of levels, more variants to get to the finish, etc. And for the first few levels it works really well but later on the game starts to show its flaws. Most of all it's the controls in combination with the level design. The controls works like this - to assign some function to a spirit you have to click on it and then click on a corresponding button. The spirit stops on its place until you assign him his function (which is good) but the other spirits are still walking forward. And because they're all in one dense line you have only few seconds (like two or so) to click on the right button before the second spirit outruns the selected one and jumps to his death (for example). This is not only flaw in the controls by itself, the worst part is that many levels use this as a challenge - the game uses it's own weakness against you. Great example of this is the 30th level where you have to control three different lines of walking spirits at the same time. You have to be not only really fast but also very accurate so you don't choose unwanted function. After a few good levels the game changes from relaxing to this really annoying attention and eye-hand coordination test. It would be much, much better if you could just simply assing functions to the spirits when the game is paused or if the level design wouldn't rely on superhuman reactions. But this is not the case.

Pros:
-Nice graphics
-Relaxing music
-Many levels
-Some interesting achievements

Cons:
-Flawed controls / level design

Spirits is a Lemming-style game where you guide spirits home by changing how the wind blows and reshaping the ground.

Each spirit can be sacrificed to perform a specific task such as blowing in a particular direction to assist the remaining (providing you strategically positioned it right). It’s a strategy game with a balanced flow of progressive difficulty and replaying levels gives the encouraging feeling of “I know I could do better.”
The hand-drawn art is simply gorgeous and the soundtrack delightful.

What's Spirits? Spirits is, basically, the Lemmings. It's the same concept. You must guide your spirits to the end of the level.
You can ask your spirits to sacrifice themselves to open the way (Growing a tree, making wind, digging the ground...), or just let them walk around to see where they can go. It's a pretty simple concept, but it's still a nice one.
The music is just fantastic. Some sound in the menu are earrapes (buttons), but except those ones, the sound is beautiful during the whole game. Graphics are shiny n' cute, the whole game is played in a Orange-Black-White tone, it's nice and relaxing.
You can buy it via Steam for 8.99€, or via the Humble Bundle store (link : https://www.humblebundle.com/store/p/spirits_storefront) or 7.49€.

Conclusion : It's a pretty little game with nice level design, nice graphics, and a nice price.

If you played Lemmings in the 1990's, the term 'Lemmings lite' would probably adequately summarise this game for you. It is a great deal prettier with better music, though.

A game in the same vein as Lemmings, Spirits notably has far fewer powers to give your spirits. This is because, unlike Lemmings, Spirits relies upon a sort of physics engine where windspeed is the most important factor, capable of replacing most of those mobility-boosting skills in Lemmings. In theory, by using the capacity to shape windspeed by adding new currents to the mix, you can achieve subtle solutions to a wider range of problems with a smaller number of tools.

... Too bad it doesn't work out.

The main problem is that the game focuses heavily upon "perfection" in getting your spirits out, and that means you can't miss. Unfortunately, the power you have to block wind flows through some areas are a total roll of the dice as to what they will actually do - sometimes, they block a passage you need blocked, other times, they bounce off some miniscule glitch in the geometry, and go flying into some random spot that winds up ruining your whole map, forcing you to reset. Again. And Again. And Again. Because, through no fault of your own, the game bugs up in specific spots, but you get punished for those things beyond your control.

Then, there are missions where you have to blow spirits up and over spikes on the ground, but where there are also spikes on the ceiling - you need to carefully change the airflow to miss both... but then, there's really no means of judging where a spirit will go in those wind streams but for trial and error. And if you mess up, start again.

Did I mention that some of the later stages are quite long, and restarting restarts the whole level, where you can again be forced to reset due to geography glitches because those are, again, not under your control? Yeah.

Which brings me to what I ultimately have to rate the entire concept behind Spirits upon - Lemmings was a game about precision, which is why having very precise, very predictable effects worked for it. Spirits adds in this system that demands precision randomness and a cloudiness where there's really no way to foresee what exact positioning of powers will just barely dodge the traps without trial-and-error gameplay.

The original Lemmings was frustrating but fair.

Spirits is just frustrating.

I wish there was a "meh" option because I'm kind of in the middle with this one.

On the one hand it's a beautiful game, both in the art and music... very easy to play, quite simple all around, I've seen other people use words like relaxing and calming to describe it and sure, I can see that.

On the other hand if you're like me and you're trying to do things perfectly you really have to complete each level in such a painfully specific way it's somewhat ridiculous. I mean kudos to the developers (if this was what they were trying to achieve) because this game seriously grinds your brain and will really test your patience and make you pay some serious attention to detail. I honestly can't tell if it's creative or if it just got lucky with how nit-picky the spirits are on the ground and how randomly they seem to move in the air.

If you just want a puzzle game to relax with and casually play and aren't super concerned with perfect completion then sure, I'll recommend this game (do aim for the sale price).

PS I am ashamed of how long it took me to realize something useful happens if you click on the spirits while they're in midair.

Game cost less than one beer (if you pick it on sale) and its artistic and soultaking experience.

A pretty simplistic relaxing puzzle game, where you guide a group of "spirits" to the objective destination.

The main flaw is its lack in story, and its somewhat inconsistant mechanics. Sometimes a few spirits will make it across, while some others will die or get stuck.

I don't believe this game has enough going for it to ask $10 retail for.
A better price would be more around $1 - $2.50

However it is a nice game to pick up on sale, and it's pretty relaxing, and is a complete puzzle experience.

I never had the honor of playing 'Lemmings' so i cannot compare the two. Only found Pros, no Cons. Its not a complete hassel if you have to start over for the sake of spirit saving. Good atmosphere and music. Simple but enjoyable game.

Spirits recalls the 90's classic Lemmings as you guide your wistful creations to the glowing vortex across landscapes filled with obstacles and dangers. The game succeeds narratively and visually and does a superb job of introducing the player gradually to increasing complexity and difficulty. The Steam Overlay and widescreen modes are supported, as are Steam Achievements. Altogether Spirits is an attractive, polished Indie puzzle game that is both nostalgic, minimalist and innovative. The developers should be congratulated for designing such a well rounded title. Spirits should appeal to any indie gamers, and for the bargain price should have mainstream appeal as well.

I've only played it on my phone, but it's cool. I doubt it's worth its price on PC; It's basically a simplified Lemmings

Beautiful game with shallow Lemmings-like gameplay. Let the little buggers blow air, block air, build staircases or dig around, while you try and collect flowers, too.
It's not as easy as you might think. But it isn't deep either.
The current price is a bit steep, so my suggestion is to wait for a daily deal or something.

[Rating: 71/100]

Fun and challenging game. Nothing too hard and nothing too easy though :) Very calm and peaceful :3

very relexing, it's so calming that is you loss to many spirits, you don't mind starting over.