Spiritfarer
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
By the time guests check out, you realise you’ve spent far less time with them than running around after them
Developer/publisher Thunder Lotus Games
Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Release Out now
Nothing is certain in modern videogames, except death and crafting. Thunder Lotus Games’ latest – a departure from the action games with which the studio has made its name – is nominally about the former. Charon is retiring from his job in this liminal realm, and it’s up to replacement ferrymaster Stella to retrieve spirits scattered across a sea of small islands, so they can finally pass on to the afterlife. It’s a weighty task, but she takes to the role with youthful zest: a cheerful hero for a less than cheerful business. Yet if you’re expecting a moving treatise on love, life and loss, you might be surprised by what follows. In catering to the last requests of these spirits, Stella often feels like the owner of a waterborne B&B, as she darts about preparing food and ensuring her anthropomorphic guests’ lodgings are to their liking. Elsewhere, it’s like a side-on Stardew Valley – you’ll plant crops, tend to chickens and cows, refine ores and threads – with a hint of Wind Waker’s island adventuring.
There’s a lot going on, in other words, but Stella’s exuberance for her new position is infectious, and it’s reflected in the energy of her movement. There’s surely a great platformer waiting for her in the next life, though many of her abilities are underutilised off the boat. Occasionally you’ll need to bounce on umbrellas, double-jumping, gliding and ziplining over gaps to retrieve key objects, but almost everything you actually need is within relatively easy reach. More often you’ll use them to get around the boat quicker, as over time it grows from a couple of cabins into a miniature village. You have control over its arrangement, too, deciding where to place new builds for maximum convenience (or aesthetic appeal), although the chance to introduce some kind of puzzle element is squandered. Only once does the layout become an issue, as elderly hedgehog Alice asks that she be rehoused somewhere closer to deck to save her tired legs – having seemingly failed to notice that, conscious of her advancing years, we’ve already installed her on the ground floor.
She’s the fifth animal to arrive on our now-bustling boat, and the requests are piling up. Keeping your guests in good spirits isn’t too challenging: each has different dietary preferences, but before too long you’ll have amassed a broad menu of dishes to satisfy their tastes. Giving them a hug can quickly lift their mood, too, with tangible results. Avuncular frog Atul will start playing a happy tune, while Giovanni the lion will begin flirting with other passengers – much to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife, Astrid. Others will give you gifts, or hand over fish they’ve caught. But that assistance only goes so far; for the majority of demands you’ll need specific ingredients, which means trawling these seas to locate them. Sailing involves plotting a route on a top-down map inside your cabin and simply waiting until you get there – though there’s usually plenty to keep you busy en route. Any items you obtain normally require further processing on the boat: fibres become threads and then fabric, while ores need smelting into ingots and logs carving into planks. Each of these chores prompts a short minigame. Cooking is simply a matter of placing two ingredients in an oven and waiting for the results to emerge. Refining ores means putting coal into a furnace and trotting between two pairs of bellows to maintain the temperature needed to produce ingots. You’ll later put these into another oven before hammering them into sheets, as smithing is added to your long list of jobs.
The animations for all of these are charming at first, not least watching Stella’s Everlight – a kind of ethereal multi-tool – transform into everything from a pair of oven mitts to a giant saw. But while tracing a perfect zigzag line to get four planks from a log instead of a wonkily-cut two might be satisfying at first, the appeal of these minigames wears thin through grinding repetition. Every request takes time and toil, and often using ingredients for one leaves you short for another. And so back you traipse to the one distant island that has what you need, via a fast-travel service it can take upwards of a minute to reach just so you can save time on a longer, more direct journey. Other missions invite you to locate unknown spirits, forcing you to engage a series of identical characters in conversation until you stumble across the right one. And when night falls, which happens often since days are short, you’ll be told it’s too dark to navigate, forcing you to sleep so you can resume your journey in the morning – though you’d best prepare breakfast for your hungry guests before you disembark.
Spiritfarer loses itself in so much tiresome backand-forth, ladling on delightful incidental details in the hope that you won’t notice that each character’s story has become little more than an extended shopping list. It’s hard to form any emotional attachment with your guests – by the time they check out, you realise you’ve spent far less time with them than running around after them. With dialogue presented so flatly, rarely with any change in music or mood (here, bizarrely, the animation is at its least expressive), its stabs at emotion barely qualify even as glancing blows. And so, even with a wistful piano accompaniment to each parting speech, we remain unmoved by these departures. It hardly helps that this is a game about death that fails to reckon with what loss might mean for those left behind – as Stella continues her chores and her crafting with the same unceasing grin, the other passengers’ moods more likely to be affected by an empty stomach than an empty heart. Her patience for 30-odd hours of exhaustingly twee palliative care is admirable, we suppose. But by the end, we understand why Charon quit.