Spiritfarer

Spiritfarer is a game about becoming a boat-woman for the dead and ferrying them to their final destination. The dead have assumed animal form.

You play as Stella, an impossibly bright human who seems more than happy to help these spirits on their journey. She doesn’t deliver dialog, but her face usually expresses how she feels when interacting with the world and spirits.

Mechanically, it’s a somewhat simple 2D platformer with crafting, boat, and movement ability upgrade systems to gate progress (a Metroidvania-lite maybe?) There is no combat per se; there are some timed events, but not a lot of pressure on perfecting them.

The world is very large, at least larger than I thought it would be. There were multiple points where I didn’t realize how to find material to proceed to the next area. It may have been that I missed the context clues that the map was hinting at, but that was a little frustrating in an otherwise smooth progression.

The crafting systems are addictive in almost a phone game kind of way. You’ll fish, cut logs, sew, smelt, feed animals, etc. Many of these are time based, or use variations of repetitive button presses / holds. There’s also a day / night cycle that impacts if the spirits are awake or if the boat needs to stop for the night. There’s also a food-growing / cooking mechanic that relies on in-game time (gardens, taking care of ”real” animals, etc.).

I often found myself multitasking these as you can start them on the boat, and proceed with exploring the next island while they countdown in the background. A spirit in the game calls out their disdain for another character’s min-maxing (minimizing time spent to maximize results), which is what I tend to do in games. It’s clever, but the game allows for it anyway. The variation on crafting stations grows over time, with some of the late game ones having less overall purpose for crafting what the spirits need.

As you gain multiple boat companions (you have a giant boat), you have to interact and do tasks for them to make them content or introspective enough to carry out the journey to their final destination. Usually that means making them a house and furnishing it with mementos. As they make peace with their fate they’ll go from socially jovial to despondent as they want to be alone to think things over and make that final decision.

There are also sidequests from other spirits you meet on the islands that result in crafting material or blueprints for upgrading your workstations.

While crafting systems are standard ways to pad out game time nowadays, there’s somewhat of a disconnect when delivering an emotional goodbye and then going back to that now-formulaic gameplay.

The artwork is very good and reeks of charm. The sprites and animations work to drive home the characters and their emotions without being overly detailed or dramatic (drama is where the music delivers). Simple hugs are felt. The style is rich in color, somewhat contrasting the overall task at hand. Seeing the characters off was a driving factor that kept me playing late into the night.

Like the artwork, the stories of the dead give just enough detail for you to get a sense of their life and possibly relate their story to someone in your real life, which further connects you to them, purposefully or not.

The music is incredible (except for fast travel which is bombastic and reminds me too much of The Simpsons theme). The town / island themes use instrumentation that hearkens to real life locales and adds heavily to their atmospheres. The music during events and the music used in seeing your spirit companions off really works to convey the wistfulness and longing of saying the final goodbye to someone, and, at least for me, introspective of my real-life relationships that should be rekindled.

The game is on every current generation platform. I played it on PC through Game Pass.

Highly recommended