Spiritfarer

Spiritfarer by Thunder Lotus Games is sandbox resource management caretaker sim in which you play the Spiritfarer, a ferrymaster who helps departed souls find peace and cross over the other side. The spirits are personified as anthropomorphic animals and it’s part of the Spiritfarer’s job to keep peoples’ (ahem) spirits up by keeping them well-fed and giving plenty of hugs. The mature underlying storylines about love and loss belie the game’s twee art style and mechanics. Also, there is a sexy chain-smoking deer.

Spiritfarer involves a lot of ocean travel that requires waiting, even after shortcut fast travel points are opened on the map. Oftentimes, especially early in the game when the map is obscured by fog of war* (there’s no war here but you get the idea), the player will simply plot a course and wait to see what locations and points of interest are uncovered. While you’re traveling you can tend to the ship and build things, fish, plant and water crops, or convert resources–or just dick around, even jumping around can be fun. Resource conversion employs various mini-games, usually involving button-press timing or cursor control, and precision allows you to collect extra resources as a bonus. You talk to your passengers, cook food for them, build homes for them, complete quests to help them come to terms with their death and, eventually, ferry them to the other side. The game also has a day/night cycle, and at night the ship shuts down and cannot sail again until morning. I appreciate the theme and design intent behind this, and particularly early in the game I appreciated that the game forced sedate pacing, but it can get a little annoying if you’re just trying to figure out what to do next and the game keeps enforcing these “time out” periods (more about that later).

I originally started playing this game because I thought the wonderful graphics style and animations and laid-back play style would go over well with my kid, and it did. I’ve been gradually introducing them to a wide range of games, both in terms of mechanics and graphics, and Spiritfarer occupies the “games without antagonists” category. They played for a while and enjoyed jumping all over the boat, fishing, and cutting logs. The storyline is a bit too mature for them to understand so whenever they talked to anyone I just made stuff up. They had no idea they were ferrying spirits, they just thought they were managing a boat of animals that like to eat and hug and talk about how they are all best friends who like pizza.

Eventually my kid drifted off to other games and I recently picked this one back up to continue playing on my own. It’s a relaxing game but I admit I do get impatient the enforced pacing of the boat. It’s not always obvious how to get the resources needed for upgrades that are required to travel past certain dotted lines on the map. So while I enjoy traversing the map to clear the fog and explore, I do not enjoy aimlessly wandering the map trying to figure out where to get the 10 pieces of aluminum, or whatever, I need to actually progress the game while being interrupted by night cycles. Similarly, the resource conversion minigames, which felt novel at first, have now become a bit of a nuisance, particularly the forge, which has a annoying timing mechanic if you’re not into that sort of thing.

I may not finish this one, HowLongToBeat puts the main story at 23 hours but I feel like* I’ve been playing it quite a long time and my sense is I’m only about halfway through, but I definitely enjoyed the journey and I keep discovering new things I like. I recently met Susan at the museum, who is basically the game’s meta response to in-game collectibles, and was personally delighted. (She’s basically the exact opposite of Animal Crossing’s Blathers, which I profoundly appreciate on a philosophical level.)

** It’s actually a bit of an exercise to check your total hours played on XB so I have no idea. I don’t know why I don’t have that data right in front of me but I should.