Spiritfarer made quite a splash (boat jokez) during Giant Bomb's own 2020 GOTY but at the time I was determined to learn as little as possible about it; by the end of 2020 I was familiar with Thunder Lotus Games's other projects (Jotun, which was IGotW #31, and Sundered, which was IGotW #174), and was curious enough about an upcoming narrative-focused adventure about the afterlife, which seemed so dissimilar to their previous output, that I wanted to go in completely blind. The only tidbits I learned was that the game has a lot of emotions in it and that - much like the underrated Wii classic A Boy and His Blob - it had a dedicated hug button.
Spiritfarer is both a little more involved than that while paradoxically concerning itself with very little outside that emotional core, which does indeed revolve around a very sentimental journey as your silent protagonist helps ferry the deceased to their final resting place. To do this, you sail around some version of purgatory in a ship much like Charon of Greek mythology (said Stygian boatman even appears at the start to show you the ropes just before his own time comes) picking up wayward souls, usually by helping them with some of their unfinished business. After a soul becomes a passenger, you're obliged to meet their needs while they in turn help you out with chores until they realize their time has come, at which point you sail them to the same Everdoor that Charon left through: whatever awaits on the other side is not for the protagonist (or us) to know, but the best they can do is ensure their friends have resolved any lingering regrets and have souls as light as feathers as they say their final farewells.
The first passenger you meet is Gwen, here, who was a dear friend to the protagonist Stella in life. Now she's a deer friend in death.
In the meantime, you're completing the requests they give you, ensuring that their stay on your boat HQ is as pleasant as possible whether that's by feeding them the food they like or building them personalized quarters, and continuing to upgrade the facilities and size of the boat in question to accommodate new resource-crafters and residences. For as much as there is to do, all of it is ultimately in service to your cadaverous clientele, as their requests continue to require resources of increasing rarity and value or visiting specific islands that you might need to sail quite far to find. To complement this progression, the game has a heavy exploration element to it as you scour the oceans, The Wind Waker style, to discover new islands and pick up the occasional jetsam while also visiting prior locations once their resources have grown back. The game has this easygoing flow to it like a Stardew Valley life-sim where you can chase after a dozen objectives simultaneously, but there's nothing time-sensitive and it's a simple enough process of attending to your companions on a regular basis in order to keep them a good mood; if you ever run out of things to do, you can always fish or try to catch lightning in a bottle.
Graphically, Thunder Lotus continues to exhibit its penchant for animation, with all of its characters wonderfully realized in part due to their expressive body language and animalistic designs. I'm not sure yet if they're meant to be beasts from a world full of anthropomorphs or if that's just the form spirits take in the afterlife - sort of a "spirit animal" situation - but hearing the stories from the passengers about their former lives, I suspect it's the latter. The music's charming, as is the sense of atmosphere as the day/night cycle forever moves along in the background. Due to the protagonist's power originating from some solar-powered glowy "Everlight" McGuffin, which powers not only the boat but manifests any tool they might need - fishing rod, shovel, watering can, etc., helpfully streamlining the usual hotbar juggling found in other life-sims - the boat won't move at night, forcing you to either take a mid-journey breather to fix up the ship or harvest crops or cook food or go fishing under the moonlit sky, or simply hit the hay in the protagonist's cosy cabin to move time forward to the following morning. Even the game's spookier encounters, like the enigmatic Quartz Dragon or the hordes of flying jellyfish, are rendered in a hauntingly enchanting manner.
I've played many variations on Inventory Tetris, but Property Tetris is relatively fresh. The important thing is remembering where I stashed the kitchen: it's small, so it's usually the thing I squeeze in last after a rearrangement.
Given the saturnine nature of the game's themes of death and the great beyond, there are times when your clients find themselves in a funk simply due to their circumstances and remembering the family they left behind. It's not always easy to keep them in good cheer - most like hugs, but not all of them - but at the same time these moments of melancholy are important to the journeys they're undertaking. Each of the game's many lost souls have long narrative arcs and backstories that deliberately draw you closer to them to make their eventual departures all the more painful; it's like saying goodbye to your closest Animal Crossing companions after establishing a fond rapport, rather than just the ones you disliked enough to dig trenches around their homes until they finally got the hint. The concept of the Everdoor - a portal to oblivion that would be ominous if the game didn't treat its offer of finality as a beautiful mercy - feels directly inspired by how NBC's The Good Place ended, which would've been a few months before the game's release, so I'd argue if you liked the themes of that show of seeing out the afterlife with empathy for others and a lot of self-improvement you'd probably feel right at home here, even if it's not quite as big on the humor (Albert, the guy you go to for ship upgrades, has some atrocious dad jokes for you though). It might just be because all the characters are animal anthros, but I also felt some BoJack Horseman energy from its deeper studies of taking stock and bouncing back from a lifetime of personal failures.
I'm still early in the game - I was surprised to learn just how lengthy it is - but I'm enjoying my time just working towards new upgrades and sailing to parts unknown for the discoveries that await me, whether that's something monumental like a new passenger with their own storyline of side-quests to pursue or simply a gaggle of materials I'll need for my next building upgrade. I'm almost surprised this didn't come from Sigono, the people behind the Opus games: Spiritfarer nails their familiar format of creating this soulful and emotional narrative core while giving you enough simple but appealing gameplay hooks to carry you through the story's length. Even though I thought Jotun and Sundered showed a lot of promise as pure action games, and were equally gorgeous to look at, I'm impressed that Thunder Lotus had something this thoughtful and elaborate in them, no offense intended. From what I've seen of Spiritfarer thus far its GOTY approbations seem very much deserved, and I haven't even been emotionally destroyed by my first departure yet.
No real rush. Not like any of my passengers have lives to get back to (I mean, I ostensibly do, but...)
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Post-Playthrough Edit: The game managed to maintain a consistent level of quality and engagement throughout, though I'll admit that I was reeling a little bit by the end. Given the way the game concludes, though, that exhaustion may very well be an intended element. The life-sim aspects are understated enough that you can ignore, say, watering your crops every day or feeding your chickens if you don't need those resources right away, though it's obviously a good plan to try to anticipate the materials you might need for a future upgrade. You usually have enough active goals to not worry about stockpiling for the future, though. Exploration continues to be a prominent factor, though you need to be wary to continue making progress with your passengers and their tasks because their departures get you unique items you need to upgrade your ship to pass one of the map's few barriers. Overall, I'm very impressed with the level of depth this game gets to, whether that's in its gameplay systems or the emotional depth of its character arcs. My original 5 Star score is still applicable.
Since a commenter asked, I have a rundown of my feelings on each character and their respective arcs (spoiler-blocked for obvious reasons):
Gwen the Deer: As the first, I figured Gwen was setting the stage for the type of farewells I could expect from everyone else: a life with some regrets and some acknowledgement of character flaws, largely related to her well-off but mostly loveless upbringing and how that affected her ability to love others into her adulthood (and the game at its most BoJack Horseman, I feel, since we got something similar with BoJack's mother), but overall a positive send-off. She became my yardstick for the emotional weight of the many more passenger departures to follow, probably by design.
Summer the Snake: I feel like I missed a little bit of context from Summer talking about how she was haunted by "the dragon." Naturally, there's an implication that it's drugs (a la chasing the dragon), but it could easily be some kind of anger management issue the way she talks about its aggression, the way her father dealt with it, and using meditation to calm it. Or it could be the cancer that killed her, though she talked about it like it was a lifelong struggle. Or it could be an actual dragon, since meeting actual dragons becomes part of her healing process in the underworld. Maybe the goal was to be ambiguous about it; that you can fill in any self-destructive tendency of choice and make the narrative work. Either way, a somber sayonara. (Appreciated that we had at least one gay passenger to sympathize with, where her orientation is just what it is rather than a major element of her characterization.)
Alice the Hedgehog: I figured the game would pull a "can't get the fog to clear" Alzheimer's angle on us eventually
so this one did feel a little cheap, though it does raise some interesting questions about why their afterlife selves suffer from the same ailments that plagued them in life. Also, did it seem kind of mean to ditch her at the Everdoor rather than take care of her until she was lucid enough to consent? It was clever how they wrapped up a game mechanic - changing one's outfit - into its resolution though. Nice old lady who regularly cooked meals for us, and it's always a shame when the mind goes.
Gustav the Owl: Just a chill-ass cool dude, if a little pretentious and picky about his food. Helping him create a beautiful if oddly-shaped gallery for his art pieces only for him to immediately turn around and agree to leave as his work was done is a class act in an arc full of them. He was also another passenger that was pleasant to have around: he played music that cheered others up like Atul did, and he'd occasionally give you valuable items or delicious sushi. I wonder if someone on the dev team put him in the game to venerate the person he was based on, since he seemed like one of those endlessly interesting, erudite polymath types that have become a dying breed. Man, do I sound too much like I want to be a Gustav when I grow up?
Astrid the Lynx: Astrid is a survivor. A woman who has seen many hardships in her life, either her own or those she has helped over the years as a union representative or in other magnanimous roles. It's one thing to focus on her relationship with the inveterate cad Giovanni, as unfortunate as that was, and consider her pitiable for how she kept coming back to him; however, I feel the game makes the case that Astrid is someone who doesn't give up on people and, in that case, was unlucky in love as a result. A little more pitiable is the final journey to the Everdoor, where it seems she's withered so much since Giovanni leaves that she can barely see Stella any more: the fate of all those that live to extreme ages, though particularly tough to see for such a fighter. (I also like that, for PSN at least, 38% of players told Astrid about Giovanni's affair and only 12% kept silent - and the latter had to account for everyone grabbing both trophies for the sake of the platinum too, so it's really a dilemma no audience was going to be split on).
Giovanni the Lion: I think most of us have complicated feelings about cheaters, especially when everything else about the person is entirely convivial and/or they happen to be family. Giovanni's an awful philanderer that treats Astrid terribly by leading her on and then sleeping around behind her back, no question, but the game makes you sympathize with him just a little bit by how fatherly he is with Stella and how he's honest and open about his tendency to use people. That his whole arc takes place within Astrid's is curious too: he almost feels like an unfortunate footnote in her story, rather than being much of a character himself. You don't even need to build a house for him (he's happy to sleep on a couch in most cases).
Stanley the Fun Guy: It was nice to have a kid on board with all that youthful energy until the implications of why he was there hit me. After his goofy side-quests (that actually clued me in on some materials I was wondering where to source) I was dreading hearing about whatever Casper the Friendly Ghost-ass tragic origin story was coming. The game leaves it a little vague (it's implied he fell from a great height) but it feels like the game's checking off all the melancholic death tropes - Alzheimer's, little kid, chronic disease - for maximum heartbreak. Needless to say, it wasn't easy to let the little guy go, though his precocious maturity made it a little less depressing.
Bruce & Mickey the Hummingbird & Buffalo: These reprobates. I did admire the bait and switch of making you think they were your typical duo of heavies - the little one talks a lot, the big one's quiet and intimidating - until the themes of the game kicked in and it turned out the quiet one had just been in a coma so long that his afterlife avatar was insensate to the world as well. It did give their relationship a bit more pathos and depth, as well as exonerated the loudmouth's (Bruce, the bird) posturing and made it apparent that the tiny bird lugging the enormous water buffalo around wasn't just a cute visual gag. Too bad their presence put a permanent happiness debuff on almost everyone; I had to shift them if I wanted the rest to cheer up more.
Elena the Whippet: I assume most of these characters are sourced from the lives of the developers, maybe relatives or colleagues that have since passed on to give the game that authentic touch, because Elena's a very recognizable figure in that of the overly harsh teacher who - made clearer in retrospect after you've long since moved on from your school days - had the best intentions when pushing you as hard as they did. You can be a kind, attentive, popular educator that still manages to inspire their students, but the punitive hardasses tend to be ones whose lessons stick with you longest. I don't know for certain if Elena's dog breed is meant to be a whippet - one of those austere pointy ones that can run really fast - but I like the idea that the devs were making an indirect Whiplash gag. Clearly all I've retained from my school education is how to make bad wordplay.
Buck the... Bird? Dragon? Cockatrice?: I thought it was funny that Buck, a textbook NEET, was the only one who refused to move out. I liked this relatable dork and how his D&D-inspired quest line, which is one of the last character arcs you do given you need some late-game items to get it going, felt like one last frivolous adventure before it was time to say goodbye to this world and get on with the salubrious ending. The post-game even gives him a few treasure hunts to do with you Wind Waker-style, providing additional hints if the image clue of where X marks the spot is insufficient. He's like your little perma-buddy.
Beverly the Other Owl: I gathered Beverly's one of the new characters added to the Definitive Version, since she has no related trophies, but to my surprise she's another nice old lady whose mind starts going before you ship her off to the Everdoor. Game kinda repeated themselves here. She's very chatty and is sad she doesn't talk to her remaining family much; she instead unleashes her long, winding stories on her neighbors instead (Stella being one of them). By the time she's repeating dialogue to you because of her short-term memory loss, the conclusion to her arc feels all too familiar. One thing I did appreciate is that she's very small, so her house was easy to work into my enormous Tetris wall of structures.
Jackie the Hyena: The cutscenes make it evident as they go on that, in life, Stella was a nurse that guided patients through their end-of-life care, lending more credence to my theory that this entire Spiritfarer business was simply her own personal passage through purgatory more than anyone else's, and the Definitive Edition tips its hand early with Jackie as a fellow nurse/caregiver with a crude sense of humor applied to make a grim job a little less so. Jackie's odd in that you're regularly called to his place of work - a facsimile of a hospital/asylum - to complete quests, rather than have him on your ship until he eventually storms off due to your meddling and becomes a stowaway for a while. I was moments away from completing the game when his presence became known, giving me a little more work to do to make his stay palatable. He goes through some shit towards the end, taking stock of how ineffective he was as an orderly and his overall selfishness and anger issues, but like Gwen manages to pass through the Everdoor with a clear enough conscience after admitting his faults.
Daria the Bat: Jackie's patient and another surprise late-game passenger. I guess she's meant to be schizophrenic or something, talking about wonders only she can see and then falling into periods of catatonia afterwards, but such ethereality apparently has more weight in the underworld where everything is mostly metaphysical already. Helping her out of shell, having been cowed into docile obedience by Jackie and the other orderlies to protect herself and others, she recovers enough of her own being to consciously make the trip to the Everdoor. I'm not sure I particularly liked all the enigmatic monologueing or the irksome platforming challenges with the disappearing platforms, but she's an interesting example of what the afterlife might resemble for one who spent so long lost in their own mind. (And she didn't once talk about how dumb cheerleaders are.)
Atul the Frog: I really didn't want to take Atul to the Everdoor. His avuncular charm and zero pickiness when it came to his food, as well as his ability to cheer up everyone aboard with his fluting, made him a delightful presence. Fortunately, or unfortunately, you never have to send him away: he simply disappears after his last quest to share a big meal with his fellow passengers, saving you the sorrow of a goodbye. I honestly thought I bugged the game out after the last quest disappeared and him with it, until I found his spirit flower - the item every guest leaves behind in their room once they've been sent away - and realized what he'd done. I kinda wish I could've said my farewells though.
Stella the Human (and Daffodil the Cat): Well, yeah. The clues were there. I'm not saying I'm some twist-detecting mastermind killjoy, but when a game is forty hours long and mostly involves watching timers run down you have plenty of time to think. Stella wasn't dead at the start of the game but she certainly was dying: a cancer or illness at some sort had struck her at a relatively young age, and all of Spiritfarer could be said to be her dying dream. Kinda similar to the premise of Eternal Sonata, in fact, which might've been another reason I was able to predict it. One last glance through the old photo album, which made it concrete how Stella knew Atul, Gustav, Summer, and the rest, before passing through the Everdoor herself with her cat (who I think is hinted to have died a while ago and had been waiting for Stella).
