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Dealing with death is not easy. If you have ever lost someone very close or loved very much, grief and sadness are emotions that seem to crush us and isolate us in a pit with no source of light or hope. However, we must learn that Death is something as natural as Life. Thinking about this controversial topic, Spiritfarer is a game that comes as an emotional journey to teach the player how to deal with these complex feelings. 6s3a63
O showmetech received a copy of Spiritfarer to Steam(PC) da Thunder Lotus Games and after a few weeks of guiding spirits into the afterlife, we bring you a complete analysis of this beautiful and profound work of art in video game form.
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Spiritfarer is a game about death. You play as Stella, whose job it is to lead the dying spirits through the Everdoor to their final death when they are ready. Well, that would be a simple way to approach this game. But we would be being very superficial. Spiritfarer is, after all, a lesson in kindness.
Helping a spirit get ready to leave for the afterlife involves cooking for it, hugging it, and building it a home on your huge boat. And for that you must take care of sheep, play music for plants to help them grow, extract coal and even learn to forge tools and items.
It's a very relaxing management game where you spend most of your time gathering things to do other things. However, unlike Stardew Valley, in Spiritfarer you carry out different tasks not in search of material gains, but to improve the “end of life” of your fellow travelers, completely for free.
"It's a kind of kindness that the game motivates the player to practice, in a very subtle way."
When a spirit s your ship, you build them somewhere to live, so you end up with a collection of small houses stacked on top of each other. Among them, you place other buildings that you need for the proper functioning of a community: gardens for growing vegetables, a sawmill and foundry to process the raw materials you find in the world, a loom for weaving.
Each of the spirits in your boat teaches you how to utilize one or more of these infrastructures, and once you've built them, you can move everything around, stacking and swapping things at will as if they were small building blocks of toy.
Each spirit is an animal that represents the person they really are. Alice, for example, was a sweet old lady (now a hedgehog) who liked old-fashioned food and apple trees, and asked to go somewhere exciting with me and in that way reminded me a lot of my own grandmother.
Before she boarded the ship, I arranged my ship's layout as sensibly as possible, with few spaces. However, shortly after that one of the other residents told me that Alice was having trouble going up and down the stairs. So I rearranged my entire boat specifically around her, and since she liked the orchard, I made sure it stayed close to her house. It's a kind of kindness that the game motivates the player to practice, in a very subtle way.
The end is just the beginning 536s4h
Spiritfarer rewards you for paying attention and trying to be kind, and Alice got a permanent boost of humor from being near the orchard. I even made apple pies for her in the kitchen! Every spirit has a list of likes and dislikes, and some even have food allergies, and you can only discover all these things by trial and error.
Likewise, your cookbook is a blank slate, so you should just try to combine a root vegetable with a little flour, say, and see what happens. It's an intriguing and satisfying kind of puzzle, trying to figure out what things become what other things are, in advance.
As you perform tasks for them, your diverse crew will make other requests. They will share memories and go through trials, or they may ask to be left alone. You can hug them all, and it cheers them up. The hug is great, because everyone hugs you in a slightly different way, with an animation that fits with who they are. Astrid, a lynx, for example, always looks surprised for a second, before letting go of her big paws. The animation and art, in fact, are universally beautiful and full of charming details.
"Even though Spiritfarer is an experience that evokes sad feelings in its essence, the game is also very funny, especially in the different dialogues."
While I mentioned earlier that all your work is done for nothing but kindness, making your inhabitants happy does have some benefits. At certain mood levels, they'll give you valuables to sell or extra raw materials they've gathered, which is handy given the amount of travel you'll need to take to acquire them otherwise.
The locations and islands you visit are spread out across a surprisingly wide map, divided into different regions with different styles – misty pine forests, industrial towns, agrarian rice farms – and as the spirits’ requests become more complicated, you have to travel further afield to get different types of resources.
While some things can be bought or harvested in cities, others are brought together through events where, perhaps, you must sail into the heart of a storm to catch lightning, jump to catch the shimmering rainbow blasts of meteors raining down from the sky. , or even ride on the back of a dragon. Each of these events is also linked to one of the spirits, so you're left with a lot of interesting memories after they're gone.
Despite having spent a few hours slowly creating the map, be aware that there is a fast travel system in the game that promises to facilitate the journey of the player and Stella. Even so, it was worth investing my time and also stopping and talking to everyone.
Even though Spiritfarer is an experience that evokes sad feelings in its essence, the game is also very funny, especially in the different dialogues. Even ing characters (like a shark who runs the ship upgrade shop and loves puns) are given loving details.
An unbearable lightness 5z2a4g
The destinations themselves are also a lot of fun, with lots of hidden chests and secrets, and side quests that are a little weird. This often involves a fair amount of platforming sections so that, in the end, Stella can find sanctuaries in the world where abilities can be unlocked, such as sliding, double jumping, and even a zip line.
However, this is probably the weakest part of Spiritfarer, as the jump seems a little slow, and the zipline is very clunky to use. It's a necessary element to progressing on your journey and helping your friends, but it could have been done more carefully.
The good news is that while you have to make and fix things all the time, the work doesn't become tiring because you don't need tools, so you'll never have to craft a new hammer or fill a watering can, for example. You carry everything you need with you in the form of a magical globe of light that becomes whatever you need it to be at the most opportune moment.
“At the end of the day, everything in Spiritfarer is like that. Measured, thought out, detailed and, above all, kind.”
This feature contrasts well with the complexity of how many different types of fish, rocks and fabrics there are to handle, and the elegant controls are also worth a mention here. While it takes a little getting used to, you can scroll through all the menus, inventories, and quests using just one keyboard. It is possible, if you prefer, to play Spiritfarer entirely with one hand in the WASD or directional arrows position.
At the end of the day, everything in Spiritfarer is like that. Measured, thought out, detailed and, above all, gentle. Even the weather seems to have an intention, the cycle of day and night, the routines you get into. The way you interact with your new friends is engaging and sometimes you will be surprised. However, it's important to that, given the game's theme, Spiritfarer will likely make you very, very sad, but in a warm way. In a way that makes you think about who you lost, but also what they left with you and how close you are to them.
