Game Review - Spiritfarer

Game Review: Spiritfarer (Farewell Edition) by Thunder Lotus

Score: +2/-12

"Spiritfarer®: Farewell Edition is a cozy management game about dying. As ferrymaster to the deceased, build a boat to explore the world, care for your spirit friends, and finally release them into the afterlife. What will you leave behind?"

Spiritfarer has essentially three themes:

• Cozy Life Sim - gameplay really is quite cozy to the point of excess and pointlessness
• Platforming - minigames that are too frantic to be fun
• Dealing with Death - of characters you actually want to die as soon as possible

The start of the game really feels promising and seems cozy and fun, but play more and everything takes a nosedive -- not interesting, not fun.
After our thoughts on various aspects of the game, I'll close with one final section about the Theme of game and possible interpretations. There's no score for this, but just something to think about -- but BEWARE SPOILERS.

Graphics and visuals

• -0 Cartoony side scroller. It's passable though not really modern. I guess it could be worse and pixellated.
• +1 Working with what they have, they still manage to give some compelling audio + visual experiences, such as when sprits transform or depart.
• -1 Not enough zoom most of the time: Especially as your ship gets larger it's hard to find where you place things and really there should be a zoom-out view so you can for example quickly check if your sheep are ready for shearing rather than just platform your way over.

Irritating Platforming / Minigames

• -1 Where they are not optional is the minigames to get materials. And generally there is always something irritating to thwart you so the overall mood becomes "frantic" and "frustrating". "Frantic fun" wears thin really fast.
• For example, the first minigame is Jellyfish. You basically touch them to get currency and you touch the rare green ones to get special materials.
  When a green one is approaching, you get an indicator on the right side of your screen. Several can pop up at a time.
  However, there is no way to know how far they actually are and they can travel at different speeds. So that indicator is really only barely useful.
  What could have been done is to make the indicator smaller to indicate that the green jellyfish is further away. Otherwise you just stand around waiting and meanwhile another one might fly by.
  Which is theoretically okay because you can go to another location, so this is really a critique of poor visual feedback to the player.
• -1 Your ship layout hinders you.
• I suppose this is part of the "platforming fun" but when you get more buildings you become more prone to accidentally jumping into a ladder and slowing or stopping unexpectedly.
• For each minigame you can try to adjust your layout to help but that also becomes tedious after a while.
• -0 Some of the platforming is really tricky for a cozy game, but the "rare chests" you get contain trash anyway so it's just for personal satisfaction and I encourage people who don't care for platforming to just ignore them.
• -1 The expansion and Daria's storyline adds even harder platforming, well beyond what a "cozy" game should be. It's mandatory if you want to progress the story for Daria/Overbrook and in the final platforming puzzles, a misstep could send you all the way back to the start to do it over.
• -1 When your ship gets bigger, some of the minigames get even harder.
• For example, Pulsar Rays/Deadly Pulsar Rays start appearing offscreen somewhere on your ship but you have literally no idea where because you can't zoom out to see and the valid area is so big.
  Then you spot one and you have to chase it while being hindered by all the buildings you've placed because every time you touch somewhere you can land, your jump or drop stops.

Shallow Life Sim

• -1 There's not that much to do in terms of the life sim part for two reasons: You are just constructing buildings, and your ability to get materials is locked by quest progress.
• For example to get Aluminum, you need to go to the arctic area in the north, but to do that you need a special material to upgrade your ship with an icebreaker. A material that requires one of your passengers to die. So this is a hard progression wall that is somewhat counter to life sims.
• -0 The tech tree just isn't that deep or interesting.
• Once you get something built, most of the time it is stupidly easy to get piles of materials. I guess that's the "cozy" part.
• -1 Some items are really irritating to actually use, like the Windmill.

Dealing with Death / Story Arcs

• As indicated in the game description, a major part of the game is dealing with someone dying.
• -1 This would actually be a much more compelling game experience if you actually cared about your passengers, but your passengers (and most characters in the game world) are literally constantly condescending.
• Constantly summoned by someone calling you "peanut", "munchkin", or worse, and getting passive aggressive requests, gets tired fast.
• If it were a few of the characters you ferry around, it could be considered "diversity" of personalities and "realistic" personality clashes. But it's basically everyone.
• -1 The passengers are nobodies. They are no one of real consequence except that some are are actually related to your character's life and maybe in your character's real life they actually cared about them. But (and this is of course opinion and your experience may vary) I didn't really care for any of them.
• There's a reason why enduring stories from the past dealt with people of consequence -- people in key leadership roles like nobles, rulers, generals, and heroes. They are interesting.
  Even when that romantic past moved on to modern times, writers chose "important" characters like wealthy notable persons in society or people with special powers.
  Really, no one is interested in biographies of nobodies and that's why you don't see biographies about people who didn't accomplish anything of consequence.
  
• So for a game/story to use a bunch of people who are of no real consequence, their stories must be really interesting and compelling. Except they aren't and combined with their personalities, they are unlikeable and I just didn't care whether they lived or died.
• -1 Actually I did care if they died because the sooner they died, the sooner I could unlock regions with materials I needed.
• The life sim progress is literally dependent on characters dying.
  You need them to die to get a special material to craft necessary upgrades to your ship to access zones on the map.
  And once they are gone, you realize you didn't need them anyway so there's no sense of loss or fond remembrance.
  Some of them theoretically do work around the ship or give you resources if they're fed and happy but this happens so rarely you don't even notice when its gone.
  Clearly there's a push to force you to experience loss but the emotional attachment isn't there, the impact is weak, and it's complicated by the mechanics of requiring them to die as soon as possible so you can access the many materials the game says you need but you can't find.
• -1 The early character stories are much more interesting than the midgame ones. So when they leave your ship, there was nothing memorable about their stay and nothing memorable about them to hold on to when they're gone.
• Some characters even lie to advance their story progress and the character has zero agency, making the drama in their story feel highly contrived.
  For example, Bruce asks for 100 carrots. I already had over 100 carrots and 100 peaches in inventory by that time and the next quest step is to talk to him. I speak to him and he accuses me of not getting him what he needed (which was apparently neither carrots nor peaches) and the next step is he wants to pass on to the next life (die). Huh?
• -1 Some characters are just low-effort "throwaways" like Elena, who basically shows up just to give you some minigame challenges while denigrating you at every step.
  If you fail the time or score challenge, they can condescend to make it easier each time, so the whole concept of the challenge is pointless except as an excuse to insult the player more.
  Elena does do one additional thing but there is no emotional buildup or any foreshadowing to it so the emotional impact of the task simply falls flat.
• +1 Some individual character stories are actually well told in how they are paced and trickle to you, and how the dialog is written. Too bad their stories just aren't that interesting, and this applies to less than half the characters who come and go on your ship.

Miscellaneous

• -0 No sorting (e.g., alphabetical) for inventory such as cooked food or recipes, and there can be dozens in your inventory.
  Most inventory tabs don't have this issue since there aren't that many items you can't easily recognize by the icon, but when it does happen (e.g., food and recipes), it's irritating.
  Cooked food doesn't seem to follow any order at all, such as most recently cooked first, or matching the recipe collection list.
• -1 Stacks of stuff are added/removed one unit per keypress even though you can load up to 50 units into certain crafting station or try to sell 100+ units to a merchant.

Theme / Interpretation

SPOILER WARNING

Magnify or cut-and-paste the deliberately tiny text below to read this section as it basically is a HUGE SPOILER but one which may make you so uncomfortable you might not want to continue the game. Usually platforms like Steam or Epic Games Store enforce a two-hour play time limit before they will refuse automatic refunds.

Beyond the idea that the game is about "handling death" or "handling loss" is unavoidably an element of WHEN this occurs.

So for example, a character could have dementia (Beverly). We see this progress during her story arc and eventually she admits it's too much and it's time to go.

In a way that is necessary to close off her story arc. From a story/mechanic point of view, it is absolutely necessary because you actually need her to die in order to get a critical crafting material that will let you reach the next zone that is otherwise locked to you with no other way around it. So you MUST take her to the Everdoor where she passes on -- i.e., "dies".

However this opens the action to various possibly uncomfortable interpretations: For example, should a person with dementia just give up and die? The practical part of closing the story arc requires her to die, but I think there's an unavoidable judgment here as they could basically have told another story.

And some characters like Gwen or Giovanni don't even have a condition like Beverly's that denies them their personhood/personality in the same way. They apparently just want to die.

And Should you assist them with suicide? Unlike Atul who basically just disappears from your ship, Beverly like many others requires action on your part to pass on: You must take them to the Everdoor. Is that "assisted suicide"? Or are they basically dead and this is just a metaphor?

An alternate interpretation is that these characters are all actually already dead and you are just reliving an experience of your relationship with them. However, at the point they enter and leave the story, there really isn't much to suggest this except that you are the Spiritfarer whose role is to take them to the afterlife. Even then, the game undermines this interpretation because characters like Gustav exist in the game world as if they were just another person and have interactions with other living characters in the world. They come on your ship and continue their life until their story arc is done.

I think the game wants you to engage in such deeper thinking, but the necessarily limited actions you can choose from (basically, you have no choice) and the linear flow of the story can make you feel like you have a particular interpretation and were forced to take a particular action regarding when and how someone dies.

Sure you could choose not to take Beverly to the Everdoor but then you are stuck in the game unable to progress. So not assisting her suicide (if you choose to interpret it that way) is not an option.