You’ll Spend Longer In The Shower Than Playing Fading Clouds
I sat down to play Fading Clouds twenty minutes ago, and completed it a few seconds ago. I don’t think I’ve gone from ‘right, let’s play this game’ to ‘right, let’s review this game’ in such a short space of time, so this review is coming in fresh. The details certainly haven’t slipped out of my memory.
It’s the abiding problem with a lot of these budget puzzlers and platform games that appear on the Xbox Store, often from publisher Afil Games. You can’t be confident that your £4.19 will stretch particularly far. It sounds like a pocket-money amount but it begins to add up: if you can’t get an hour’s worth of gaming from a tenner, then gaming as a hobby starts to look unviable.
Short, Sweet…And Can We Go Back To How Short It Is?
In Fading Clouds’ case, it’s something of a shame because what is here is good. It takes the strong work of Sands and Relics, released earlier in 2026 (a game that we liked enough to give a 3.5 out of 5 to), and adds on top of it, rather than effectively re-releasing it with a new set of puzzles. It’s a game that is so frictionless and simple that we played and finished it in less than thirty minutes. It’s as ethereal as the clouds that form its levels.
You might have played similar puzzles. Each level is a grid of clouds with a star that represents the end of the level. Your character needs to find a path to the star which touches every square on the grid, without once double-backing on one of those squares. If they cross a square that you have already stepped on, they will tumble into the void. If they finish on a square that is anything other than the one next to the star then, again, it’s void-tumbling time.
I remember playing these kind of puzzles in some of the very first LEGO games. They’re not particularly new. But Fading Clouds presents them charmingly – I particularly like the homely backdrops, which seem to be drawn from a cozy farming sim – and adds on a few extra mechanics to tinker with the solutions that a player will need to find.
Afro Caution To The Wind
My absolute fave mechanic is an afro. Yep, some squares contain a ‘fro that immediately gets propped on top of your character. This hairstyle allows you to stop at any point and rebuild one of the clouds that have dissipated. If you’re in a dead-end, or have a square in a dead-end location, then you can hastily rebuild the cloud behind you and escape-rope out of there. It’s a little clumsily implemented – you have to hold X and manually choose the direction in which you place the cloud – but it enriches the puzzles hugely. And no, we have no idea why an afro would give you this power.
The second mechanic comes in a little later, but can best be described as grey clouds. These darker grey squares can support two separate crossings before they disappear. That opens up more strategy, as the levels necessitate that you never leave a cloud behind: you need to get rid of these squares twice before the end of the level. They facilitate puzzle solutions like figure-eights, backtracking from dead-ends, and generally being more relaxed about where you are stepping.
In the context of some cloud-walking, they make sense and complicate the possible solutions. I like to resolve the darker clouds first, knowing that they could become a problem if I haven’t walked over them early. The afros can wait: I treat them as power-ups that are beneficial when I need them, but I don’t tend to plan for them. And these two approaches worked well enough to get me to the end of Fading Clouds.
Wait, Wasn’t This Meant To Be Play Anywhere?
That end of Fading Clouds arrived earlier than we expected. You can rattle through the early levels of Fading Clouds at pace, and that chews through the rather limited 30 levels that are on offer. By the time things got difficult for me, I was already on level 25, which – with five levels to spare – was on the late side. I burst through the ticker tape after about twenty minutes of play. 2000G of Gamerscore was collected in about fifteen minutes.
It’s too low, in my opinion. Something needed to give: either the difficulty needed to arrive a little earlier, or more levels were needed. Reasons to replay would have helped matters too: if there were optional objectives (stepping on a certain square in a set number of steps, for example) then we might have played for longer. But as it stands, I spent more time writing this review than playing the game. And this is a short review.
Easy. Peasy. Puzzling.
If you’ve got a little disposable cash and a love for easy-peasy puzzles, then Fading Clouds is a decent punt. Few indie puzzle games on the Xbox Store are this frictionless and smooth. You certainly won’t be reaching for any Youtube walkthroughs. And it’s different enough from the swathes of sliding puzzles and sokoban that dominate the releases.
But if you’ve got any consideration towards the whole ‘£ per hour’ of the games you buy, then Fading Clouds is something of a red flag. It’s a combination of short and elementary, which means £4.19 for twenty minutes play. Sure, those twenty minutes are pleasant enough, but are they worth just shy of a fiver? I press X for doubt.
Important Links
Fading Clouds – Drifting Onto Xbox And PC – https://www.thexboxhub.com/fading-clouds-drifting-onto-xbox-and-pc/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/fading-clouds-xbox-series/9P552TCMBR44/0010
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/fading-clouds-xbox-one/9P812M5T5NQV/0010
There’s a PC edition too – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/fading-clouds-windows/9NF5SLDR69DR/0010
