Spiritfarer Review
Not to say that other weeks have been good, but it’s been a while since we had a week as bad as this one. Not only was there a heinous display of the exact kind of racist, authoritarian violence that spawned the ongoing protests, but on top of that racist civilians were allowed to fatally attack protesters after receiving encouragement from the police. It feels like asking for the bare minimum, but I hope each person involved in these wretched deeds is brought to justice and that America as a country will take actions to keep this from ever happening again. I don’t have any clever segue to go from this topic to video games, but this week I played Spiritfarer.
In Spiritfarer, players take control of humanity’s newest psychopomp. In the game’s opening minutes, Charon, the previous ferrymaster of dead souls, has come to the end of his career as the Spiritfarer, so he must train his replacement, or rather, replacements. In a new twist for the office, there will be not one conveyor of souls but two: a cheerful young human named Stella and a fluffy feline named Daffodil. Together, they are the Spiritfarer and it is their duty to tend to the souls of the deceased as they ferry them onto the next stage of existence. To help them with their task, they each wield an Everlight, a magic light that can become any tool they might need, from oven mitts to fishing rods. Additionally, they are captains of a magical boat, because you can’t be a ferrymaster without a ferry. The boat serves as a floating town for the Spiritfarer and can be expanded upon with farms and production facilities as well as homes for the departed souls in their care. But the spirits aren’t here to stay, so as players learn about and care for them, they must also prepare to say goodbye.
Spiritfarer is a mixture of a Harvest Moon-style farming game and a touching narrative game and it is absolutely amazing at both, but, because it’s less heavy of a topic, I’ll start with the farming game aspect. One of my biggest frustrations with farming games is the constant need to acquire, repair, and upgrade tools to be able to do everything in the game. Spiritfarer gets around this with the incredible Everlight. Unlike other games where players must have an adamantine axe to fully clear cut their farm and access all the space they own, the Everlight is immediately capable of becoming whatever tool Stella needs for the task at hand. There is no need to wait and gather upgrade pieces to be able to harvest advanced materials, meaning players can focus on the actual fun of farming games: harvesting resources and making things out of them. On top of that, many of the refining activities have a unique mini-game to keep players interested. To smelt metal ore into usable ingots, players must tend to their foundry by pumping a pair of bellows to keep the ore in its required temperature range for a set amount of time. If the player lets the furnace dip below the temperature threshold, the ore will stay solid, but if it gets too hot, the furnace will overheat and players will lose control, wasting their fuel and being forced to start over. To convert minerals into useful powders, players must use their crusher, which requires players to quickly and repeatedly press a single button, mirroring Stella’s in-game actions as she pulverizes the unlucky stone.
Unfortunately, the job of the Spiritfarer isn’t just chopping lumber and growing crops. If there’s one thing I think will scare people away from Spiritfarer, it’s the game’s focus on the passing of those you care about, especially because the game is fantastic at making me feel so connected to the passengers. The game uses a number of angles to endear the passengers to the player, most are subtle but they add up. The first facet of this is the expressive character models and animations. In the world of Spiritfarer, and our world too for all I know, the souls of the departed take on the form of anthropomorphic animals that best match the personality traits of that person. This allows for character animations and expressions to be a bit more exaggerated and evocative. The dialogue writing for each of the passengers does a great deal in helping players connect with them, because each has a very clear tone that is adhered to in every conversation. Alice, the elderly hedgehog grandmother, speaks gently, shies away from exotic foods, and loves to tell stories about her grandchildren and the long life she led. Conversely, Atul, a rotund and jolly frog, is always full of energy, loves any food offered to him, and encourages Stella to be adventurous and free, including playing in a lightning storm.
Far from the last, but certainly one of the most effective, of the ways Spiritfinder forges bonds between players and characters is the improvements they request for their houses. When Stella builds a passenger’s shipboard house, it’s far from sparse but it lacks certain personal details and those reflect some insightful information about each passenger. Astrid is a simple woman and all she wants added to her house is a modest TV and a beer fridge, because she’s content with very little. On the other hand, two wannabe big shots Bruce and Mickey want big and flashy additions to their house because they want a life of wealth but have no idea what that means or looks like, so they force Stella to come up with what the additions should be. There are plenty more examples, such as what foods each passenger eats, how each passenger helps Stella acquire a new resource, how each passenger is recruited, that all do a fantastic job of telling stories about these passengers, but this review can only be so long.
I think it’s safe to say that I’m totally in love with Spiritfarer. I don’t think there has ever been a game that blended satisfying, meditative farming gameplay that lets me slip into a zen-like state together with rich character design and writing that brought me to tears over the loss of my own loved ones. For all of the enjoyment and catharsis I got from it, I easily think Spiritfarer is worth the $30 asking price.
Buy this game at full price
It’s worth every penny they’re asking
