Spiritfarer (2020)

A surprise banger. I didn’t really know anything about it beforehand and expected a story-based walking simulator type experience but there’s actually a lot of game here and it’s mostly very good. In fact it’s probably 30% too long but would still be satisfying experience even if you don’t make it all the way through.

There were definitely moments that spoke to me personally as an intensive care doctor who often deals with end of life care, and also just as a human being. It’s best enjoyed slowly and deliberately.

Il m'a fallut quelques jours pour digérer cette expérience vidéoludique. Je vais essayer d'être la plus factuelle possible mais je ne promet rien. Je ressors en effet bouleversée de ces presque deux semaines où j'ai parcouru le jeu d'une traite.

L'histoire du jeu est plutôt simple: Charon le passeur d'âme de la mythologie prend sa retraite. C'est à vous, Stella, de prendre sa suite. A bord de votre tout nouveau bateau, guidez les âmes des défunts vers l'au-delà ! Mais elles ne sont pas prêtes à partir. Il faudra donc exaucer leurs dernières volontés et leur aménager un petit coin cozy à bord.

Le jeu est guidé par le besoin de produire/miner des ressources pour nourrir tout ce beau monde et construire les diverses amélioration de confort de votre vaisseau. A terme vous vous retrouverez rapidement à la tête d'une véritable ville flottante avec sa ferme, sa cuisine collective et même son cheptel de bétail ! Et bien sûr des maisons sur mesure pour tous vos invités.

Les âmes qui voyagent avec vous paient leur voyage en "oboles" une monnaie qui vous permet de débloquer des améliorations pour votre personnage qui vous permet d'explorer de nouvelles zones pour trouver de nouvelles ressources, pour crafter des nouveaux items etc.

En plus d'une direction artistique léchée (bordel les animations des personnages sont grandioses) la vraie force du jeu c'est son écriture. Il n'est jamais aisé de traiter des thèmes comme la mort ou la maladie sans sombrer dans le pathos. Pourtant Spiritfarer réussi ce tour de force avec une grande pudeur et une grande justesse. Ce qui est important c'est ce que le jeu nous dit mais surtout ce qu'il ne nous dit pas. Ces choses horribles ou très belles parfois tout ça à la fois sur lesquelles il jette un voile et qu'il laisse à notre libre interprétation.

Oui la fin est prévisible. Et ? Cela n'enlève rien à la puissance de son écriture.

Je ne suis pas forcément d'accord avec le postulat des dév' qui considèrent leur jeu comme cozy. Mais c'est en tout cas un voyage contemplatif avec les gens qui nous aiment et comme souvent on aimerait qu'il dure encore un peu plus longtemps.

A couple years ago, I picked up Spiritfarer on the Switch. The buzz around the game was quite positive and it looked neat. I made it about 2 hours into the game before I fell off.

I tried again this year to give it another shot. This time I made it quite far, at least a dozen hours in and through most ship upgrades and many passengers and... I just can't make myself keep playing. There are many times where a game is greater than the sum of it's parts but I just cannot say the same about Spiritfarer. It is a collection of boring, repetitive tasks and minigames that when combined just become even more repetitive and boring.

That isn't to say there are no redeeming qualities. The graphics, aesthetic and tone are great. Even on the Switch it looks clean and runs well. It just doesn't do so to support anything worth spending so much time on.

I am always on a lookout for narrative driven coop experiences so I naturally got really excited as I learned that Spiritfarer can be played in a local coop. Playing this game with someone was definitely a better experience, since I am not a big fan of games that make you do daily chores. I always preferred crafting over mining in Minecraft and Spiritfarer is no different.

The concept of the game is awesome. You have your own ship and you sail to different islands on a map, completing quests. Sorts like the 2D version of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. However upgrading the ship is a core mechanic that makes you progress in Spiritfarer. You collect resources and then craft / build new buildings for your crew or upgrade ship to access new areas in the ocean. While you are doing that, you spend a lot of time talking and caring for your spirits onboard. Apparently the game is heavily inspired by the Ghibli's Spirited Away and I see the connection.

Spirits on your ship are quite demanding. Requesting you to build expensive upgrades, cook specific dishes and taking them to specific places. Through completing their requests they will tell you insights about their lives. Spirits are vibrant and memorable. You spend quite some time with each of them before saying goodbye. However piecing together all the fragmented bits of information that the spirits tell you about themselves, proved to be rather difficult for me. It is like reading a book where the story makes sense only at the very end. So the patience is required when playing this game.Especially considering hefty 30 hours of playtime, required to complete the game,

But I would lie if I said that the game is boring. You easily end up playing for several hours straight, telling yourself to complete only one more task before closing the game. However mid to late game does slows down significantly as you already discover most or all the map and you just cruise up and down gathering resources. And at this point game does become repetitive. Depending how much you are entertained by the mini games onboard your ship, this last part will drag. I liked crafting mini games - sawing wood, crushing materials, smelting metals... but gathering materials in different events wasn't doing it for me. Such events usually feature materials falling from the sky that you just need to catch. My co player was luckily greatly entertained by the cooking mechanic, although figuring out new combinations that produce new dishes, was almost impossible in the late game , as you didn't have proper way of tracking your cooking experiments.

But regardless of repetition, playing this game felt good. The art direction is superb with diverse themes and color palettes of different areas and islands. Soundtrack is memorable and NPCs add liveliness to the places you visit with well written dialogue that entertains you.

Luckly I do not have much experience with death - a core theme of this game. But it defenitely got me thinking about the concept of dealing with the loss and ultimately accepting it. I will definitely remember this game when such event ultimately comes in someone's life.

Spiritfarer's steam page does the game a criminal disservice by saying it is a "Cozy management game about dying". To have a story focused on death, you must also tackle life, purpose, happiness, sadness, and everything in between. Spiritfarer at its core is indeed about dying, that much is true; but it is also so much more.

Before we get into that though, I want to discuss the obvious first. This game, from a presentation standpoint, is absolutely flawless. Animations are brilliantly detailed, and the soundtrack is a brilliant orchestral score that knows when to hold back during the quieter moments, and when to let loose during the more grand moments. Character designs are great too, with each one feeling unique and they are able to feel alive thanks to the fluid animation work. It's an excellent blend of handheld animation and artistic style that drenches the game in a playful charm that few other games have been able to pull off. If you are intrigued by the game's visual style then that alone is worth the $30 asking price in my opinion.

The game play here is probably the weakest element, although that isn't to say it's bad. There is plenty to do to keep you engaged throughout the game's 25 hour run time, and I could get lost in it for hours harvesting crops and cooking food for my spirits. Traveling the map is great fun too, and almost always rewarding you with new materials, new characters, new hidden treasures and more. None of the space on the map feels wasted and the progression as you slowly expanded into deeper areas of the map was a great way of keeping the game from feeling too stagnant. There were some quality of life issues that probably could've been resolved though. Pulling up a menu to craft buildings instead of using the blueprint table would've been nice, and some sorting methods for the cook book would've saved me some frustration. Little things like that never pulled me out of the experience though, it's not as frustratingly head scratching as Animal Crossing or something along those lines.

Getting back to the story now, I think it's important to note that on top of already being a shit year globally, 2020 has been a year where multiple people in my life have passed, and this game has an uncanny ability to remind you of certain people you know in your own life. Spiritfarer's confident writing is what propels this game above its self imposed description of "A cozy management game". It doesn't manipulate your emotions to feel for certain characters, and it isn't afraid to tackle its subject matter in a far more mature method than most M rated games could ever hope to.

If Spiritfarer was written by a bunch of morons instead, each character would be some stupid, overly wholesome, perfect person that coddles you into caring for them before the game kills them off in a cheap attempt to make you "think about life n stuff". Luckily, Spiritfarer isn't written by morons. Characters are just that, characters. Similar to people who you know throughout your life, you will like some of them, you will hate some of them, and others may just never really notice. They are there and then they are gone. What's important is that none of them are flawless people. Pretty much everyone of these characters will have some skeletons in their closet when they board your ship, and like everyone at the end of their life, they will either need to make amends or they won't. Time doesn't wait for you to make that decision. Death comes quick and without warning, and you will lose characters who haven't fully finished everything they wanted to do.

It is prudent to remember that this isn't some user fulfilling game where all the spirits you meet just like you because you are the protagonist. In fact, a lot of them will resent you. It is your duty to see these spirits to the end of their journeys, you don't just get to make friends with everyone over some tea. Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule. The contrast does an excellent job of helping you appreciate the characters who you really did care about though, and it did make me tear up a number of times when I did lose someone I did care about. Gwen in particular made it hard for me to say goodbye to her.

Spiritfarer isn't afraid to tackle these dark ideas of death though. Despite the labels and poetic inclinations that humanity tries to assign to death, it is an unthinking, unfeeling reality that we will all need to face some day. You will see people who die without finishing their life's work, they will die with regrets, and they will die without ever really knowing who they were. The tragedy is built into the story's core, and it hurts watching certain characters go because you KNOW that they are leaving behind regrets, but they just can't take it anymore. The juxtaposition hits particularly hard when you notice the ones who embrace their death with open arms, and the ones who quite literally start pouring out their regrets onto you moments before they pass.

It isn't hard to see why this game resonated so much with me. Feeling that pain is very similar to what it's like to see someone you know die when they are only a few years older than you. It's sobering to say the least, and yeah, I cried a lot at the end of it all.

"What will you leave behind?"

Perhaps the answer to that question isn't as important as is the way that one interprets the question. If you were to die right now, what would you leave behind? A caring heart? Your artistic creations? Some way too philosophical reviews on GG? Again, the answer isn't what is important here.

I understand I may have gotten a bit away from the point of reviewing this game in the first place, but I think it's important to note exactly what this game made me feel for as long as I played it, and how it's going to affect my life going forward. Life isn't just doom and gloom waiting for death to arrive, but it will be if you make it that way. Live in the now, and make sure you leave behind something that is worth having.

Both an adventure and resource management game, Spiritfarer follows Stella (and very important cat Daffodil) as she takes on the role of ferrymaster from Charon. Stella will collect spirits across an expansive world map which all require different materials or food to keep happy. The ultimate goal, however, is to help each spirit find peace so that they will crossover through the Everdoor.

In the overworld, Stella will sail her ship across a vast sea to visit diverse islands. The environments are vibrantly colorful and atmospheric. Islands have different resources and some even have spirits which will ask to join you on your boat! Character design is a strength here - each spirit feels completely unique and the relationships you build with them feel personal. This makes the ultimate goal of letting them move on even harder after you’ve spent days building them rooms and feeding them their favorite foods. Grief is a challenging thing. This game helps give a glimpse into processing grief - taking stock of positive memories and understanding that life moves on. The emotional beats of letting go of spirits you’ve learned so much about feels surprisingly tough for digital characters.

Gameplay is varied enough to stay interesting. Everlight lets Stella bounce, glide, dash and float across the screen in a way that feels reckless and thoroughly exciting. Don’t want to sail to new islands? You can fish! Don’t want to chat with spirits? You can cook food, saw wood or make glass (yes, really.) Having the ability to do different things is helpful because gameplay can require grinding if you run out of particular resources - but everything helps you move forward.

A slow-burning, cozy management game where you are Stella, a ferrymaster for the deceased. In addition to meeting spirits to transport and getting to know their stories, you also need to build your boat, fish, farm, cook, harvest, and craft more items as you progress through your travels of transport. As indicated from the title, death is the primary topic, particularly with processing and accepting death of others and the self. It has beautiful animation, lovely, music, and wonderful character designs.

I would recommend going into this game when you just want to relax with a calming game for a week. It's not a game you can rush through and it's best to experience the stories slowly as you build relationships with each of the spirits. I would not recommend this game if you are looking for something short, high-energy, a lot of action, or even lighter stories.

I don't even know how to begin talking about this game - it meant so much to me for so many reasons, and I cried more than once as I played it.

The premise is magical and starts small: you've taken over as the guide that helps spirits fulfill their final requests before shepherding them to the afterlife. And the characters, I think, are a hugely compelling force in the game. I fell in love with each of them for different reasons, even the ones that were complex and prickly and did hurtful things sometimes. They were so full of personality, incredible lives with tangled feelings, sometimes holding contradiction and complexity that folded in on themselves. The more time I spent with each spirit, the more my heart opened to them and I was truly sorry to see them go when their time came. My favourite companion was Summer, so full of love and forgiveness and compassion, even in the face of her own destruction. And there was one character (Giovanni) who I just could not forgive at all, but Stella's willingness to open her arms and heart to this person put me to shame, and I took a leaf out of her book of deep compassion. In the end, as they passed on, I wished them well despite it all.

And I am so grateful that this game got me thinking so deeply about death, and holding on, and letting go. Of memories, and nostalgia, and worlds that are lost forever with the passing of the beholder. It is not at all a stretch to say that this game is a thoughtful exploration of the meaning of life, and how to live and die with dignity in spite of our missteps.

And what a beautiful way to convey those ideas. The animation of this game has reached peak fluidity, and every action from petting Daffodil to shearing sheep filled me with unbridled delight. The use of the Everlight to transform into any tool I needed was an incredibly gorgeous idea, and it was a pleasure just to move through this vibrant world full of vivid environments.

And the music and sound design of this game just melted me. For the most part the soothing background music was so relaxing I enterred a kind of Zen state while I played, but that's not to say that this game didn't have some heavy hitters. The songs that played during a lightning storm, or an encounter with a supernatural being were out of this world, and the main theme as spirits passed through The Everdoor had me tearing up almost every time.

And I haven't even talked about the gameplay yet! The formula was simple: gather resources to unlock more resources until you're able to build the things you need to expand the story. The game perfectly drip-fed me the next resources I needed, giving me access to different kinds of wood and ore at a rate that encouraged a mix of exploration and harvesting of the various rooms I'd created on my boat.

Now, I have ADHD so my experience is probably not universal, but this was a mixed blessing for me. I hyperfocussed on this game for days, and at first it was perfect: there were always three or four new things to try, ingredients to combine or places to visit, and it nailed the "just one more" formula. But around the middle of the game I started getting overwhelmed. I would start at one end of the ship, watering my plants and picking fruits and taking things out of the oven and shearing sheep and feeding guests and on and on and on the daily chores would go. It felt like by the time I reached the other end of the ship I may as well start over, and I never had enough time to do anything new because I was busy maintaining everything I currently had. I found this profoundly stressful as various indicators screamed at me for attention, and I felt bad for neglecting any of the plants or animals or guests that were counting on me to meet their needs. I sloooowly crept out of this phase, ingot by ingot, island by island, until I was able to upgrade my various rooms so that I didn't need to feed or water multiple times a day. That was a huge relief, along with letting go of the idea that I needed to be growing/cooking/grinding resources at all times. Once I just let my garden go bare, and my sheep get overgrown, and my windmill still, that freed up a lot of space in my brain for focussing on quests and other goals.

And quest I did! It took me 44 hours, but this is one of the only games I have ever played to 100% completion. Finding all of the chests was immensely gratifying (never trust a solid wall in a mine! Always assume it's permeable!!) I did end up using a guide because the game bugged out a few times, preventing me from accessing crucial resources, but also because some of the recipes I needed to discover required incredibly rare ingredients that would have taken me hours to grind if I didn't know which ones to put together.

All in all, I'm glad I finished the game but I did lose a bit of steam towards the end, right around where the standard game finished and the DLC began. Maybe I would have enjoyed the game more if I'd played it when it first came out, took a break, and then dove back in for the DLC as a separate experience.

Still one of the greatest games I've ever played, and a real delight almost every step of the way.

Spiritfarer's characters feel realistic and nuanced in a way that is only possible by virtue of their personality traits and story beats paying homage to real people in the lives of those on the game's development team.

The game is at its best when it manages to weave those stories of flawed human nature with the game's beautiful world, interacting with each other in hand-drawn scenes taking place on frigid islands and windswept cliffsides.

Despite management sim gameplay that can be tedious and frustrating with downright confusing quality of life decisions, the frequent morsels of character story development are so well-written and engaging that I powered through to a near-100% completion in 25 hours of gameplay.

Immediately after finishing the game I wanted more from Spiritfarer. More information on the world and the mechanics that drive it, or maybe additional background on the individual characters or the non-spirit world inhabitants without having to dive in to developer Q&As or the official art book for the background information I felt the world warranted. The devs, however, disagreed - they had told the essential parts of Stella's story and given background on each spirit enough to drive an empathetic connection to their final moments, and that was enough.

Or, at least in my case, I have to accept that that's enough.

This game is slow. Very very slow. Its a leisurely, slow paced game about death. That's almost a metaphor. And this game loves itself some metaphors.

The pacing is my only real complaint. And its not really a complaint. In the right mood it's ideal. If you have some time and you want to relax and sedate yourself, this is the game for you. If you're in a hurry though, it's going to feel like a chore. Everything you have to do requires waiting, tedious work. Go here, gather this, wait, repeat. There's endless resource management. That's your core game play. But wrapped around that is a beautiful package. I can't emphasize that enough. The visuals are lovely , the music is perfectly suited to the environment and happenings, the dialog is sad, funny, cute, provocative. The story is vague, ambiguous, cute, funny, and ultimately gently sad.

It doesn't tell you anything outright. The story is one you have to put together yourself with the pieces you get. My favorite kind of story telling, if you know me. It's cute , in many ways, sickenly cute. Almost. Your character has a dead eyed look of joy much of the time. Despite what is going on. A lot of the bits feel like they belong in a pajama sam game at times. This is deceptive, because the themes and the story and much of the main dislogue deal with some very mature themes and topics. I'm not really sure who the intended audience for this game is exactly. Except it includes me apparently.

I was enjoying it. The first time I did the titular task I even cried... then... the game kept going. It was still fine but I started getting bored until the second spirit I fared when I realised I had spent 10-20 hours with this game and was only enjoying it for the first 5.

I quit the game. I tried to rush and just critical path it but it was too much of a grind.

I write this review mostly as a sort of warning for other people who might have the same experience as me with this game. I played the demo a while ago and I loved it, I thought it was gonna be a relaxing game about helping people with unfinished business move on to the afterlife, building a boat, exploring islands, the sea and some mysterious events with some (and I quote from my demo impressions I wrote) "light farming and resource management".

The game is not that. It has all of those qualities, but the resource gathering, management and farming are by far the meat of the game. I'm talking about hours of grinding for a bit of back story, especially towards the end of the game.

At first is not a big deal: you're mostly moving from new island to new island, you're discovering fishing, farming and cooking and you're having fun making new recipes and seeing how your companions will react when you feed them. But eventually you find there's not really a point in doing any of that. All the characters give you a super generic line even if you go through all the trouble of figuring out their favorite meal. No interesting story, no emotional memory of how their mother used to cook this dish for them, just a 'hey I like that thanks'. Not feeding them does affect their mood, but that just means they won't do useful things for you (and by useful I mean giving you 1 resource of something you have 15 of). Even if you keep caring to feed them you still generate so many resources that you probably won't have to do much most of the time. So by the time you reach the mid game and you have to move back and forth between known islands for some quest, you don't really have anything to do in your boat. You also quickly realize that all these 'special events' are basically the same mini game of jumping up and down your ship to collect something, and you'll just start to get annoyed that the boat stops every time you pass one of them. No, I don't want to the storm for the 15th time, I already have way too much of the resource, can we please just move on. Another, albeit minor, annoyance is that the boat doesn't move at night, so every night you're forced to go to bed, watch some animation and some cut to black, another animation and then you can finally move again.

The first characters were very well done. Most of their quests were meaningful: help Alice live and adventure in a snowy town, help Gwen face her past in her parents' house, etc. You didn't really have to grind much to progress their stories, so everything fell well-balanced. You did some farming, some cooking, then you explored a new island with some meaningful story for your companions, repeat a few times, see their story end. This is only true for the first few characters, and most of the people towards the middle of the game and end are the complete opposite. Random fetch quests like 'get 1 of this in this island' with no story once you get them, unlikable personalities, so much grinding just to progress a little bit that you start to even forget what the story of each person was. It reached the point where I was just going back and forth between islands I already saw (even if they were new, most later game islands were super generic and had very little to see) to get some resource, just to finally get it, complete a quest, and have the person tell me something like 'hey thanks could you get me 2 of these other thing now? oh and please feed me I'm hungry'.

I was a little bit concerned when I heard the game was supposed to last 30-50 hours. For the story-driven emotional experience I was expecting it felt like it was a bit much. But I thought maybe they just had a lot of characters with very deep stories and they would actually pull off a 30 hour meaningful game. To me, they didn't. This game would've been so much better as a shorter and more condensed experience, but I don't really like this kind of game. But if you are aware of what you're getting into and you're fine with it, I'm sure you'll find this a lovely experience.

I ran through this game pretty quickly and I think that was a mistake.

Towards the end of the game I kinda got bored and also some of the spirits i didn't like.

The characters are the real draw to the game. I didn't talk to them as much as I should have to find out more of the back story. Also I think the switch version is a bit bugged. I couldn't complete some of the spirits cause some events don't happen. Definitely should be played on the pc if given the option.

overall was still fun. Should have taken my time with it tho.