Sky: Children of the Light

This one honestly isn't too bad until.you get a hankering for cute outfits. They pinch you with the candle collection and thats it. Honestly its the best free to play game there is. I haven't felt pressured to ever spend money, but I do pick up the season passes when I'm playing it often.

It is a bit better than your average free-to-play, mobile, daily rewards kind of game, because there is a hard cap of in-game currency you can earn by playing, which can be earned in 1-2 hours. After that, there isn't any incentive to grind for in-game currency anymore.

Personally I think what really gets ya is the FOMO: Sure, you only need to play 1-2 hours day, but the problem is that soon you'll feel the urge to do that everyday, even if it's midnight, your legs hurt and deep down you just want to go to sleep. See, unless you've played for a few years, you'll never have enough time or candles to get all the cosmetics that are currently in rotation (unless you pay with real money). And who knows when they'll return, they're only ever available for a limited time. And you reeeeally want those cosmetics, your entire friend group is saving up for it and think of how cool you'll all look! So in essence: There's a daily limit, but there's a daily limit. Meaning that if you want something, you need to methodically start playing days before the drop to ensure you've saved up enough, you can't just start playing whenever you want. Thus, you can see how it can quickly become a routine and, ultimately, devolve into an addiction (and this is by design, TGC aren't saints, these tactics are widely used in the industry and their effects on the player are well known).

So while I love this game, I'd say treat it like any other game because in my personal experience it can get addicting in the wrong hands (e.g. mine😅). But this shouldn't hold you off from atleast playing through Sky's story once, the campaign is absolutely worth it and truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I don't say that lightly.

TL;DR, sorry for the ramble: it's a beautiful and mostly relaxing game with a great in game community and vibe, and if you know that you are able to avoid FOMO and just do your own thing and enjoy it - I say go for it, you won't regret it.

I'm not sure this is the best time for me to answer since I've just found out about a change they've made that is really making me angry, but I'll try and not let that influence what I have to say too much:

Remove the game from the company that runs it, and you have a beautiful refuge to escape to when life is too stressful, you just want to fly around some fantastic scenery for a while, find a quiet corner and play some music, or hang out with real life/in game friends and be silly.

It can be completely free to play, and the absolute best thing about it is that there are no ads.

Once you hit the actual game mechanics though, things get a little more frustrating, and are very obviously geared towards getting people to spend money. There is a constant stream of new cosmetics to buy, and while they do come back, it can take a year+, so people feel pressure to buy everything at once just in case, which is why people feel the need to grind daily, but which can only really be sustained if you buy candles with real money (or if you don't give in to the FOMO and buy all the things and instead just stick to things you actually like and can afford).

The greed is also obvious in their removing features players enjoy and use regularly, to ensure candle running doesn't become too "easy", which it isn't even with the work arounds they've removed. They like to claim it's a game about cooperation, but when people cooperate in a way they didn't intend us to (in this case by using an in game feature - shared memories, to help solo players through multi-player doors when no one else is around to help), they have a massive "NO, not like THAT!!11" breakdown and ruin it (meanwhile, the "chibi fall" which lets you glitch through the doors on your own and without helping strangers, and only after you've spent a large amount of in game currency on a chibi mask or spells, has been left as is, so it really isn't about the cooperation at all, it's about control).

They've been known to "fix" any issue that results in players getting more candles as soon as humanly possible and taking back the extra candles, but game breaking bugs that can even stop people logging in altogether often remain unresolved for weeks or months at a time, and their "compensation" when this happens is to extend the times events stay around so you have more time to buy their items, or the double wax cakes event, which, without increasing the max candles you can collect per day, only helps you shave a couple of minutes off of your daily candle run.

Now, you absolutely can ignore the pressure to spend money, I have and intend to continue to, but it does mean you have to invest more time playing if you want to get max daily candles, and put up with That Game Company's shenanigans. The first part works for me - I was looking for a game I could log in to 2-3 times a day and still have stuff to do each time, and which doesn't demand much from me mentally, and Sky perfectly fits that brief. As for the shenanigans, I can't lie, the frustration is growing, but as long as I don't spend money on the game I can't really complain too much, so I'll just keep playing until it becomes too much (or they change their ways and start listening to players and how we play the game instead of to stakeholders who just want more profit).

Oh, and just to add another quick note about doing your own thing - the game can be a little confusing and overwhelming as you progress through it for the first time, it was for me when I originally played when it first launched on mobile (around 2019), and so I quit. This time around there was much more information available, and I wasn't concerned about spoilers or "ruining" it for myself, I just wanted to understand what was going on and what my goals were, so I looked it up! And you know what? I'm enjoying the game so much more this time, now that I actually understand it!

So it's good to explore on your own at least at the start (and don't skip the credits the first time you reach the end), but if you're like me and start feeling confused or just like knowing what's actually going on, don't be scared to ask for help or look things up (there is a open source wiki and loads of other resources depending on what you need, from clocks to help you know when events are happening, to keeping track of what cosmetics you own and want, to music mixers).