Soul Searching

Two in a row - another old game from the depths of my backlog - it's Soul Searching.
Soul Searching is part survival game, part the-thing-it's-called game. I remember initially wanting to skip it, but was convinced to give it a try due to the positive reviews it had gotten. I see now that these reviews were mostly by people to whom the second (and maybe the first, who knows) part of the game appealed - to people with whom it resonated. And there's nothing wrong with that. But it didn't resonate with me, and so I can only tell you about the objective qualities of this game, as well as my own opinion on it.

Soul Searching is a very "light" survival game indeed. You're on a boat, searching for souls that teach you magic (but also for yourself, I guess?) You have to manage your hunger, thirst, sleep, and deal with the occasional random encounter such as a thunderstorm or some birds. It's all very basic, and unless you're struck by bad luck, all very easy as well. The sea is also loitered with coins and magic nodes, but each individual one is not worth very much, causing you to spend a lot of time getting off your slow boat and swimming to the coin/node by your even slower self if you want to eventually afford to buy something. (Although buying/upgrading anything is not strictly required.)
As for the story... Like I said, it didn't resonate with me. I couldn't care about the supposed sadness and troubles of these pixelated figures, vague and unrelatable as they were.

Overall, from a game perspective, Soul Searching doesn't have much anything going for it. A lot of work has been put into the atmosphere and beauty of the world, and that's the part I respected most. But the gameplay is not just dull, but incredibly slow if you don't want to skip it. (At which point, why play at all?) While the story is supposed to be the highlight here, the bits of it were few and far between and left me cold. So unless you want to try if you can relate to it like some others say they have, I wouldn't recommend playing it.