Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Spirits vs Game Dev Story, the Slant community recommends Game Dev Story for most people. In the question“What are the best Android games without in-app purchases/paywalls?” Game Dev Story is ranked 3rd while Spirits is ranked 74th. The most important reason people chose Game Dev Story is:
Nearly everything is self-explanatory, and the bits that aren't get explained by your secretary. This makes for a game that is easy to understand, even if it does not seem evident at first.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Impressive style and quality
The artistic design of the game is quite dream-like, with hand-drawn characters and levels. Its sound design is equally impressive.
Pro Whimsical artistic style
This game is ethereal and relaxing, while at the same time engaging the player in challenging puzzles. The main character is comical, yet beautiful at the same time. It's almost like The Wisp and Lemmings had a child.
Pro Great atmosphere
Dream-like art direction with hand-drawn characters and levels, and excellent sound design.
Pro Varied, Lemmings-style puzzles
The game has interesting and often challenging puzzles, especially if you wish to complete the level perfectly, made possible with varied abilities of spirits that get introduced throughout the game.
Pro Simple and intuitive gameplay allows the game to be accessible, no matter the skill level
Nearly everything is self-explanatory, and the bits that aren't get explained by your secretary. This makes for a game that is easy to understand, even if it does not seem evident at first.
Pro Very engaging due to quick progression and frequent events
Contracts are measured in weeks and development cycles in months, but time passes at the rate of one day per second. Though the core gameplay involves watching little icons pop up over your employees' heads, rarely do five seconds go by without some player action being prudent, if not required.
Pro Fulfils a fantasy of creating a game studio
You get to choose what type of game you want to make, what tools you use to make it, who you hire to make it, what systems you publish the final product on and you get to watch how it is received by the world. Then you do it all over again bigger.
Pro A free demo version is available for anyone to try out
Game Dev Story Lite is available for free on the Google Play store. The Lite version ends after 2 in-game years.
Pro Entertaining business success model typical for Kairosoft games
Cons
Con Broken on Android Marshmallow devices
Unfortunately, Spirits doesn't work with Android devices with Android 6.0 Marshmallow installed (or higher). The game simply freezes or crashes instantly while loading.
Con Slow-moving gameplay
Spirits is intended to be a slow, relaxing game, though some may not enjoy the extent of the title's slowness.
Con Game is not free
Con Punctuation and grammar errors
Game Dev Story is a Japanese game that was translated to English, which shows, as sometimes there are a few grammatical errors in game. This shows a lack of polish, which may aggravate some players.
Con Unclear method of determining a game's success
Sometimes it is unclear how to find out how successful a game is.
Con It's very hard to fail
Your employees' salaries are waived the first year ("government subsidy") and you can go into the red to pay them after that. You can't develop a game without some initial funds, but since you can always take a contract to make money, there's basically no hole you can't crawl out of.
