Just as there is life, there is death -- a specter looming above us that will come for those around us and, eventually, will come for us. When that inevitable day comes, will you be able to let go of the people and memories you cherish, and move on without regrets? This is the question the characters in Spiritfarer are faced with, and the one the main character of the game, Stella, is supposed to help them navigate.

Stella and her pet cat Daffodil take on the mantle of ferrymen of the dead from Charon himself, and are tasked with exploring this limbo-esque world aboard their ship and helping spirits they find move on to the afterlife. The game takes place on a vast ocean and presents a blend of sidescrolling platformer with city builder. Its world structure and navigation will be immediately familiar to people who played The Wind Waker's sequel The Phantom Hourglass, where you select a point (generally, an island) on the ocean to visit and the ship sails that way automatically.

While she waits to reach her destination, Stella tends to her craft and its passengers. As ferrywoman of the dead, she is tasked with caring for the spirits she encounters, who will board the ship and hand out quests that require that a variety of lodgings and facilities be built. This ties into the game's crafting systems: across the oceans, it's possible to collect a variety of seeds that can be grown into crops, as well as resources that can be manufactured into all sorts of materials through a variety of minigames.

And... I hope you like those, because that's where most of your playtime will be spent. Despite the title, in this game, you do a meager amount of Spiritfaring, instead occupying yourself with performing chores around the ship, over and over, to try to fulfill the game's objectives. Plant more crops, do a bunch of timing minigames for the umpteenth time, farm money for ship upgrades, sail to a faraway island to see if maybe it offers a means to progress (and find out it requires power ups you have no idea what and where they are).

To say that Spiritfarer moves slowly is an understatement for the glacial pace at which it unfolds: the game is, no hyperbole, twenty hours longer than it should have been to have any effectiveness. As it is, the story ends up so diluted amongst the chores, it's easy to forget what your main quest is, the spirits aboard the boat reduced to quest givers at best and complainers at worst. Their story is, after all, told mostly through random conversations that are not only rushed, but also lean on RNG to occur, so you're lucky if you even get to see them -- more often than not, they'll call to you simply to complain about food. And this is but one of the problems with the storytelling.

Compared to other pieces of media that revolve around grief, regret and overcoming loss, Spiritfarer is incredibly tame. It presents a lot of themes and ideas through its characters and overall premise, but does not explore them whatsoever, and the storytelling is loose at best and absent at worst. The writing feels soft, as if afraid of tackling the topics the game ostensibly revolves around head-on, and this results in virtually every character feeling undeveloped by the time they leave, as well as the game never having the emotional impact a piece of media revolving around loss usually has.

It seems the folks at Thunder Lotus realized it, even if a bit too late. In the original release, Stella's story was paradoxically central to the game and barely touched upon by it, apart from some clumsy exposition from the spirits who all, somehow, were related to her in some way. This gap eventually led to the Lily update being released, which added an endgame quest line that expands on Stella's story. It's an exposition-heavy quest that comes right in the final act -- an ugly solution, but one that fixes the even uglier problem. The Lily update also fixed some baffling QoL omissions -- I pity anyone who played the game on release -- but I digress.

The most frustrating part is that there was so much potential here. The platforming feels great once you have every power-up unlocked. Plus, anyone who boots into the game for the first time will notice that Spiritfarer is an audiovisual delight: sprites are animated smoothly and expressively, and the 2D art is accompanied by subtle modern visual effects that enhance it in almost seamlessly. And the music in this game is incredible! There's a minigame in the southeastern regions of the map that makes me cry every time I play it, and I don't even know why. Its BGM is just incredibly charged with emotion.

Which is to say, there are moments where the game hits, even if seemingly by accident. One spirit, whose arc revolves around dementia, is often named as players' favorite character, and that's because her decay is expressed using game mechanics instead of the game's less effective usual tools. Moreover, Lily's questline is often cited as the writing getting better in the late game, for very good reasons, and the ending is so bold in its finality, it feels like a knife to the chest.

Had the game been less afraid to use that knife and more willing to twist it around, and had it been less preoccupied with pointless chores, Spiritfarer would have been unforgettable. As it is, its gorgeous art aside, it's a hard game to recommend to anyone who doesn't have an outstanding tolerance for repetitive gameplay, as well as lots of free time.

Reviewed on Feb 05, 2023


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