Spiritfarer is a beautiful reflection on the journeys through life, death, and meaning. Somehow, it manages to blend multiple genres with finesse and complexity but never loses sight of delivering touching surprises and heart.
We all need someone to ferry us through the journey of life.
Whether a loved one, a mentor, family, friends, or some other divined presence, guidance can help us through countless perils. From birth we are held, carried. Hopefully throughout the years, we won’t have to carry ourselves for the whole exhausting voyage of existence. But what happens after death? Do we have souls? Do our spirits transcend this mortal coil and move on to another plane? Is there a ferryman?
Spiritfarer attempts to answer these most loaded of questions as elegantly and eloquently as possible. It takes players on a fantastic adventure, one packed to the brim with breathtaking beauty and a surprising amount of complexity. Thunder Lotus Games manages to take an overused, often soulless genre and blankets it in thoughtful, effortless detail. Truly, Spiritfarer is one of the year’s best. But I expect as time pushes forever onward, the game will become truly revered as a classic.
Summing up Spiritfarer is a breeze, as everything regarding the game plucks from well-tread concepts. But don’t let that approachability seem like a flaw. As Stella, players have become the new titular Spiritfarer, the being tasked with ferrying souls through the oceans of afterlife into the great, mysterious beyond. Players have captained many a boat in the many decades of gaming but this task is a much more weighted affair.
Before they can pass on, these souls have final requests that must be fulfilled, past lives that need to be told, and bonds that need to be formed. Maybe Stella will cook them a meal they’ve yearned for or gift them a present. This is a game that allows players to hug spirits as a kind, beautiful gesture that often helps increase the bond between Stella and the spirits she travels with. But where Spiritfarer often triumphs is by making each of these souls feel so personable and unique. They may not always be lovely, or friendly, or helpful but these anthropomorphic animal passengers will create a lasting impression on the player.
Wonderfully and carefully written, Thunder Lotus Games ensures these numerous passengers that Stella encounters across her new job are never bland, always a soul you will care about or at least want to know more about. From the onset, Stella’s first passenger Gwen acts as a near-constant companion, aiding the player in understanding the mechanics of the game. But it’s also suggested that she knew Stella in the past, far before the events of the game. Despite an overarching narrative that compels the constant delivery of souls to the afterlife, Spiritfarer never halts with the emotional attachment of these companions.
These deep bonds are enhanced by the loving and delicate aesthetic brush that Thunder Lotus has become known with. Whether portraying the booming power of Norse gods in Jotun or unfathomable eldritch terrors in Sundered, Thunder Lotus knows the depths of their artistic talent. Visuals are captured like a moving panel from a graphic novel or ripped straight from a Disney cartoon. Colors are obsessively vivid and animations are fluidly smooth. Spiritfarer captures a kind of celestial, heavenly love with its environments, characters, and action. This is a truly blissful game to look at, nearly every frame of animation capable of being immortalized as a gif or screenshot.
In between the constant progression of getting to know your passengers, players travel the ocean of the afterlife and visit many towns and other locales. Here, new characters are introduced for players to chat with or pick up a new task from. Similar to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, much of Spiritfarer‘s waters are mysterious and up to the player to discover while also being subtly nudged in the correct direction. Stella will learn new moves or find chests in hard to reach rooftops that require a bit of platforming prowess to reach. While the game doesn’t feature the tightest controls and jumping available, it almost doesn’t matter because there is never a furious challenge meant to force players into a fail state.
The real meat of Spiritfarer‘s gameplay is done on Stella’s boat. At its heart beats a game about crafting and resource management. Often the genre results in agonizing micromanaging and tedious gaps of time where little action occurs. Strangely, Spiritfarer manages to breeze past these annoyances and creates a different kind of building game.
On her boat, Stella is required to build facilities to lodge new souls, kitchens, gardens, sawmills, chicken coops, and even umbrellas to bounce off of. The game starts off slow, requiring a handful of residencies for the small number of passengers. Then as these souls make their needs known, Stella will need to start making food, which required growing crops or tilling fields for the appropriate materials. Like any game of this type, layer upon layer of complexity is added as rarer and more plentiful resources are required to build increasingly complex structures and recipes.
Where Spiritfarer succeeds, however, is not only in the beauty and simplicity of its presentation, but also in its unique nature. Stella’s boat will swell in size both horizontally and vertically. Players will begin to layer structures in tall columns that require ladders and other objects to reach. Interestingly, Stella’s boat becomes a hypothetical game of Tetris or the building blocks of a platforming jungle. By efficiently placing structures in a way that makes it easier for Stella to jump around and navigate, players can accomplish tasks like watering and harvesting in more productive ways.
Often when crossing certain point on the ocean map, Stella and her crew may reach a lightning storm or another event that will reward specific, rare items. Catch lighting in a bottle during a storm or jelly during a migration of Jellyfish. These events are easily triggered and result in some light platforming where Stella jumps and races across the rooftops of her boat to catch and collect items before they disappear.
For two players on a couch, Spiritfarer is a cooperative joy. One player is Stella while the other acts as her cat, Daffodil. Daffodil is capable of doing every task Stella can, including harvesting and fishing and planting. Plus they can hug each other. My girlfriend and I spent a large portion of Spiritfarer playing cooperatively and it was incredible. Controls are so easy to get used to and better yet, having two players means that tasks can be accomplished faster. It’s kind of a cheat mode and can potentially shave off a significant amount of time in the main campaign. While Spiritfarer can feel like a time sink that often doesn’t have a lot of direction, I think that’s the intent.
And that’s it. That’s the game. So much depth and meaning underneath a simple premise.
Spiritfarer is beautifully elegant and simple in its execution. With a colorful, vibrant world, players will get lost in the journey of ferrying wayward spirits through the afterlife and what lies beyond. Rather than attempt to radically change any genre, Thunder Lotus Games boils down crafting and building into a poetic dance. Nothing in Spiritfarer is about tedium. Rather, it’s all an engaging means to a wonderful, ultimate, true end.
