Spiritfarer (2020)

Great game, bad timing: not just for me, but for the kind of person I am.

Did not finish, but I didn't feel like I had to. I played it during an especially stressful period in my life, and it gave me everything I needed to become mindlessly immersed and pretty much totally calmed. I love the animation, and I think anybody who appreciates animation--no matter the medium--needs to check this one out.

The writing is deceptively mature and complex. I actually think one of the reasons I'm not playing it anymore is because of how sad it is. If you know me, you know I watch and read so much sad fucking shit, so whenever I play a game that's frequently hitting me with reality checks, I get especially down.

I'm actually working on a thesis in grad school about how necessary some content is in media if the audience on the receiving end is already too familiar with the subject matter. For the average gamer, whose primary hobby is gaming, I can see this being enormously impactful. I approached this game because it's oft-cited as one of the coziest, and it sometimes is, but once you realize the pattern of what's happening, and the crushing themes just sort of appear on your boat like emotional jump scares, it became something I felt way too at-capacity with reality to endure in my escapist-space.

This game is gorgeous, creative, heart wrenching, well designed, pretty much everything you want in a game.

essentially the premise is you are helping spirits find peace so they can pass on to the afterlife. There are quests for each spirit and the stories with each spirit are very compelling. from a mole with alzheimers to a lion cheating on his wife, the characters are all very different but well written.

My main gripe is I think the game feels too long. If there were only 5 spirits to bring to the everdoor, it wouldve felt more succinct and not as though it is dragging on. The gameplay is a good repetitive, but only if it was about 8-10 hours. This game takes more than 20.

All in all, stunning game. Feels almost like harvest moon or story of season or stardew valley

Spiritfarer is a game that I think is going to mean very different things to different people. Some will play through and experience a lovingly crafted journey with some rather dark themes of death, failure, and mental illness. Others will also find pieces of people they know or may have once knew among the colorful cast of spirits you ferry around. I fall into the latter category, and I feel that this is where the game comes across at its strongest.

You can tell that the folks who worked on this game have real experience with the types of issues the game tackles. The execution of each character is just so well done. Beverly was a difficult character to interact with for me. I had a grandmother who died of Alzheimer's when I was young and I have yet to see a piece of media encompass the frustration and sadness of watching somebody go like that in the way that this game has managed to capture.

The entire questline surrounding Jackie was kind of rough too. I met my partner just before they went through a very awful experience in a psych ward and seeing the negative representation of such a place in the game really hit me. What really surprised me was despite his actions and how they linked with my personal life experience, I couldn't bring myself to hate Jackie. I don't think he deserves forgiveness, exactly, but I'm not about to condemn him for it all.

So yeah, it's when you connect with characters like that that I think this game is at its best. But that's not to say that even more unfamiliar characters don't work well too. I really appreciated how there are a bunch of characters that are just kind of mean to you. It adds a lot more depth to the game. It's not just trying to make you sad because bad things are happening or have happened to these people, it's telling their stories, warts and all. Like for some reason I think Bruce and Mickey may have ended up being my favorite character(s). There was just something so interesting and unique about them. I really wish I had gotten a better understanding of who they were in the game.

But I've rambled about the characters long enough. When it comes to the gameplay of Spiritfarer, I was consistently surprised to find an impressive level of detail put into every interaction here. From the small minigames you do when crafting to having to actually move a spirit's house down to the bottom floor of your boat so they don't have to deal with stairs, it feels like whenever the design team saw a chance for the player to play an active role rather than watch a cutscene, they took it. And that type of design goes a long way in making the world feel more alive for me.

I did find that after a certain point the game kind of sags a bit. Eventually the wellspring of new stuff dries up and you find yourself gated from progressing the story until you collect enough of a single material or stumble onto the right character to open access to a new location/resource. And for some reason nearly all locations of the southeast corner of the map feel like they just copy pasted them with some minor tweaks, which was a big disappointment after most of the early game areas feeling so unique.

That aside, I believe that Spiritfarer is truly an accomplishment. It looks gorgeous, it plays well, and with the right circumstances can bring tears to your eyes. It's really something special.

Well, I love the characters and their stories but none of that can balance the fact that I just don't like the main gameplay loop. I don't like crafting, I don't like collecting a bunch of resources.

After a few weeks without picking it up, the prospect of booting the game feels exhausting and I just need to recognise the fact that I don't want to play it.

Having recently lost a close family member I was a little scared to play this based off the reviews. However it was probably the most heartwarming game I've played in my life, I think it came into my life right when I needed it. A beautiful game about death and celebrating the lives of those who have passed.

The gameplay wasn't too hard which left room to focus on the story. This at its heart, is a story telling game. If you rush through and just complete the quests as quickly as possible, I think you'll hate it. Take the time to get to know the characters, listen to their stories and get immersed.

I feel a bit cheated. Most reviews and commentary on this game is about its emotional impact, story and characters. So when I saw it free on Netflix games I though, sure I'm up for a quiet exploration of grief and loss, let's do it.

What many reviews fail to mention is that character, story and emotions are at most 20% of the game. The bulk of your time is spent on fetch-quests and minigames to gather and craft resources. All of which I'm most definitely not up for.

That is to say, I see how the game works. All your animal friends are melded into your daily routine so their departure is strongly felt. And the artstyle is fantastic. But the core gameplay loop feels like an absolute chore, especially after you discovered basically everything there's to do and it starts getting monotonous.

I have a complicated relationship with death.

For one thing, it's been too big a part of my life to ignore, ever since I can remember. When I was a little girl, I almost died after getting very sick and spending months in the hospital, relearning how to walk. My uncle died of AIDS, my stepfathers parents were murdered when I was in elementary school, and the list goes on and on. For as long as I can remember, death has been a bigger part of my life than life itself it seems, and as such, I've spent a good majority of my life obsessed with the concept of death. I write about death endlessly. I love film and television based around death. Hell, I've tried to die, though perhaps that's not really a good example. That had more to do with genuine depression than a fascination with the afterlife. Ghosts, graveyards, horror movies; I have loved all of these things ever since I was small, and that love has never diminished.

But something has changed in the way I view death over the years, and that something is how now I look into the alternate side of the equation, of what comes along with the act of dying, and that would be grief. A lot of my work is based on the concept of grief. For god sakes, I myself have been in mourning for my grandparents for almost 15 years now. Grief makes up as big a part of me as my interest in death does. So, when I found out about the game Spiritfarer, I was immediately drawn to it. Not just because of its cute art style, or its seemingly wholesome attitude in light of a horrifying concept, but simply because it had to do with death and, more importantly, grief. That being said, I managed to temper my interest with hesitancy, thanks to my less than stellar track record with the games developer, Thunder Lotus, with whom I've had not a good relationship with.

I've tried their previous games, Jotun and Sundered, and while they also boast beautiful art styles and play well, Jotun was so intensely boring and impossible to navigate that I couldn't be bothered to continue, while Sundered was even worse in the sense that it wasn't boring but it gave you absolutely no ideas about where to go to progress. Both games, in the end, were considered some of the worst things I've played in recent years, simply because they couldn't be played. But the more I heard about Spiritfarer, the more enticed I became. It was a fairly linear, story driven pseudo platformer with a clear progression and a plot that actually interacts with you? That sounds like an actual game. And I'm happy to report, after 52 hours, that it was an actual game.

A lot of people have called the game moving. A lot of people have said it made them cry. That's the difference between me and everyone else though. I don't get emotionally wound up by these sorts of things. Instead, they give me a sense of relief. TV series like "Dead Like Me" and films like "A Ghost Story" don't make me emotional simply because it's about dying, they give me a sense of relief from the dread of the possibility of there not being anything afterwards. Spiritfarer is in the same vein. It's cute, it's wholesome, it has its darker moments but on the whole its a very relaxing and easy going experience, because that's what death itself is. Life is over. Nothing matters now. Though I'd be hard pressed to argue that anything matters during life itself, but that's just me. Why would death be needlessly complicated and frustrating? And it isn't. At least not in Spiritfarer's world. It's about taking time to contemplate what it all meant to you, what you meant to others, and making peace with that, whether you like it or not.

Did you guys know I write suicide notes for fun?

Yeah, maybe a bit of a twist to take here, but it's true. I have written hundreds of suicide notes over the course of my life, a few genuine, but most simply because the act of writing one helps me put my life into perspective in the moment. What matters. What doesn't. How I feel about it all. How people might feel about what I'm going to do. I've only ever tried to die 2 times in my life, and those attempts were when I was much much younger, but I keep writing notes nevertheless. They give me a sense of calm in a world of urgency. A moment to reflect. That's actually part of the dangerous thing about Spiritfarer for me. It made death look...good? It made me envious, jealous, and interested in following through to see if it was really as great as it was being made out to be. But therein lies the issue. I don't believe in anything, so I can be tricked into thinking anything is possible. I'm not religious in the slightest. I'm Jewish by nature, but otherwise I don't actually genuinely believe in anything at all in terms of afterlife.

The game, while great, does sort of hit a grind wall about 34 hours in. Once you've progressed enough that it's required that you grind to progress further, the fun starts to slow down a bit, and you're left with an almost Stardew Valley type of repetitiveness, which I don't personally mind, but is definitely not for everyone. And I think some of the dialogue can be heavy handed or even outright painfully awkward at times, but what can you do. The one thing I do find interested in their decisions with story is how you never get full context for things. You never find out what happened to Stella, why she died, how she died, and for a lot of these spirits, you're just left to wonder how she even knows them to begin with. Some are made crystal clear, like Atul, and some are made further clear by her sisters statements later on down the road towards the end in regards to Stella's previous job, but otherwise there's just a lot you don't get to know, and I think that's great because life is rarely full of answers or closure. Closure itself is a man made idea. Something we invented to make it seem like life has order amidst the chaos. It doesn't. So I liked that aspect.

I will also say that the end is...fairly...anticlimactic, but that that's not necessarily a bad thing. Towards the end of the game, when you're finally given some insight into Stella and how she came to be here, you are given a quest that asks you to take her to the Everdoor so she can move on just like everyone else. When you finally do this quest, it's a very somber, quiet moment. Just Stella and her cat taking their little boat to the door, hugging and then vanishing into that good night. There's no epilogue. There's no dialogue. There's absolutely nothing. At first, I was surprised. I expected some kind of further wrap up for all the time you invested into the game. But...when I started thinking about it...this is actually perfect. I mean, life itself is anticlimactic. We do all these things, lead these lives, have these experiences, all for it to just...stop. So maybe, just maybe, this was the right artistic decision after all.

Each spirit has their own personality, and there wasn't a single one in the bunch I didn't love. Some I loved more than others, sure, but I loved every one of them just the same. It made me wish I had family or people in my life that meant anything to me, because I have to admit, I got a little jealous of this adorable seafaring death commune you're forced to create. Either way, everything about the game is phenomenal, and I cannot recommend it enough, even if it does tend to drag on just a smidge too long. I also never encountered a single bug, which is tremendous considering this is an independent studio, meanwhile I'm encountering nothing but bugs in triple a titles from established studios with decades of tenure. Thunder Lotus, with this game, finally validated their existence to me, and I am happy to see what they do next.

...when I was 17, my grandmother died of a rare cancer. My grandmother was the closest thing I ever had to a mom, since my real mother was so abusive and distant. Her death devastated me beyond belief and continues to do so even today. I have never really recovered from it. I can remember sitting in a hospital hallway, looking out the window at the library across the street, and texting my friend Colton at the time. It was the weekend. I asked if I could come hang out overnight, and he said yes. I asked my mother for a ride. She asked me if I wanted to see my grandma before I left, and I said no. I always said no. My grandmother was always there when I needed her, and I was never there when I should've been. She was dying. On the precipice of nonexistence, and instead I went to a friends house for the evening. You always, when you're young, assume there'll be more time. There isn't. There's never more time. There's only the time you have in the moment.

I still regret this to this day, and likely will until the moment I myself finally face the inevitable void of nothingness.

I wish I'd been strong like Stella. I wish I could've helped. I wish I could've managed to get past my fear and discomfort surrounding the situation. Alas, I couldn't. I still cry for my grandma every day. I wish she could know me now. She can't. We only have the time we have, and we only have some people for a brief amount of time. I was lucky that I got 17 years with her, but even then it wasn't enough. It's never enough. And when the moment finally came down to it, I didn't see her off. I failed to give her comfort. I consider myself a fundamentally bad person because of this, and I will never forgive myself, even if I tell myself she would forgive me for it. Maybe she wasn't scared. Maybe she didn't need me. But none of those maybes matter, because I'll never know, and I can never convince myself otherwise.

But...

...if there is something else on the other side, if by some strange whim of the universe, there does exist something beyond what we know and what we see, a place where we can meet our loved ones once again - call it whatever you like - then maybe I'll believe just enough for the hope to see her and apologize. I'll tell her that I wrote suicide notes. I'll tell her that I tried to die too soon. I'll tell her that I stuck it out, despite not wanting to. I'll apologize for not coming in and saying goodbye. Apologize for not being strong enough. For not being brave enough to help shepard her out of this world as she had sheparded me into it. Apologize for, not literally, leaving her dead in the water.

And I can only hope she'll forgive me then.

My name is Maggie. I write & make art for a living. If you like this review, you might also like my newest novel here, reading my media blog here and you can tip me for my work at Ko-Fi.

The game ticked a lot of boxes for me. Building things, to get upgrades, to build better things while exploring the world and finding where you belong in it.

I think this game was overall decent, but I think it buried the heart-warming story under too much other stuff.

None of it was too difficult but there were large swaths of game where I felt that things dragged along. I think the game could have been sped up a little, but overall, it was a good experience.

~David.

Stopped after I grinded a lot and crashed with the last auto save being from too long ago.

The story is cute but characters do not interact with or acknowledge each other. If you make a building before the linked character joins or asks you to, you miss out on important dialogue.

Tip: don't bother watering plants, they grow a little slower but it'll save you a lot of time.

I think it's a good game if you can hold back from grinding and just enjoy the adventure. Sending spirits off is beautiful.

A surreal, wholesome and colorful story about a girl helping her friends move on in the afterlife. You oftentimes forget just how abysmally depressing the underbelly of the narrative is until it comes time for one of your friends to say goodbye. Then it hits you in the face like a ton of bricks. Their home stays as a vacant and constant reminder. Perhaps you still make their favorite dish out of habit, not even realizing that they don't need it anymore. A truly rare and unique experience.

The game play loop revolves around sailing the open sea looking for lost spirits and items while managing your boat. Parts of the map are locked behind upgrades, much like Subnautica. Boat management is akin to Star Dew and involves water/harvesting crops or processing raw materials. In addition, each spirit will give you quests that need to be completed in order for them to find peace. Another genius decision by the designers was to include a dedicated hug button. It goes the extra mile to help establish a friendship between you and each spirit.

My issues with the game is with some of the spirits. Not all of them are memorable or likable. Also the ending of the game feels abrupt. I heard they released a patch for this game that may address this issue. I haven't checked it out.

Overall, an easy recommend even if you want something unique, wholesome and emotional. It's a slow burn with excellent payoff. I don't like base management games and I still enjoyed this one.

Spiritfarer is an absolutely lovely game that I had the pleasure of not knowing anything about and trying it on a whim due to its artstyle and presentation. While I was also drawn in by its management aspect a little, I didn’t think it’d amount to much of anything other than being a means of moving the narrative experience the game seemed to focus more on. I’m glad it turned out to provide a good balance of both management sim and narrative experience, with neither overtaking the other too much. Like its synopsis says, Spiritfarer is a “cozy management game about dying.” You build homes for spirits of the dead and do quests for them while they gather their thoughts, their troubles, their regrets, and eventually come to face reality and move on to whatever may come next. The management aspect comes from keeping the spirits moods and hunger satisfied through cooking, gardening, and exploring the world for resources. It’s all very simple, straightforward, and not overwhelming. The game’s strength, however, lies in its beautiful hand-drawn artstyle and the narrative aspect being told through its diverse cast of characters who one way or another need a little push before they can move on. Each character has their own story to tell and each of their conclusions hits the emotional strings differently when it comes for them to move on. Spoilers Due to personal experiences with some of my older family members, I myself felt a bit emotional and got caught off guard when the game tackled the subject of alzheimers for one of the characters, one of the things that greatly terrifies me personally and a huge reason I like to write my thoughts down on everything. Spoilers end

If there’s a few issues I had with the game, it’s that I feel the management aspect loses tract around the mid game. By that point, you’ve explored most of the world and are instead figuring out how to unlock or find the next set of resources that will help you either move a character’s story forward, or have another character join your boat. Figuring out how to forward a quest or find specific resources isn’t exactly very obvious either and will require experimenting, wandering the world aimlessly, or looking it up on google. The game is also a bit light in its character development as the amount of idle dialogue each character has is fairly limited and outside specific moments or specific characters, they don’t really interact much with each other. I don’t believe this is a detriment to me but it might be for someone who’s looking for a far more deeper and immersive experience, since the game relies on the short interactions you have with each character and for you to put together the pieces of a character's story to reach a conclusion and eventually your playable character’s own past and story. Overall, a solid experience, a cozy game to relax to, and a heartbreaking one at times. Thoroughly enjoyed my time with it, and if this seems like the type of thing you’d enjoy, I’d strongly recommend it. If on the fence about it, I’d strongly recommend the demo that’s available on Steam.