Spiritfarer

fair warning: there are some mild story and gameplay spoilers below

I think I undermined my own enjoyment of this game by blazing through it in just a few days, which left me feeling somewhat exhausted and ready to move on by the time I completed it. In my defense, I find these sorts of resource management/collection games very addictive, and Spiritfarer is no exception. Once you have a few spirits and buildings on your ship it seems like you never run out of things to do: as soon as you're done watering and harvesting crops in your garden, maybe your kitchen will notify you that your dish has finished cooking and it's time for you to prepare another meal. Then when you've taken that out of the oven perhaps you'll realise that you haven't fed or sheared your sheep in a while, or that you completely forgot to make those ingots that you need to improve one of your buildings, oh and did you remember to feed all your spirit guests? Because now one of them is hungry and calling for your attention...

And so on and so on. It's a testament to the game's design that staying on top of all these competing tasks rarely feels like a slog, mainly because all the gathering and crafting is in service of fulfilling the various plot strands of your many spirit guests, meaning that you're always being encouraged to chase the next objective to advance the story. It also helps that the world of Spiritfarer is a delight to explore, lovingly designed and full of surprises: finding new areas was probably my favourite part of the game, and I really appreciated the way it slowly integrated platforming elements into the world design as your character unlocked more abilities. I should also mention the music, which is brilliant throughout and definitely draws you into the world as much as the beautiful art design.

With all that said, I think the game does have a handful of notable, if not hugely troublesome issues. The one that sticks out most in my mind, having just completed the game, is that once you have no more areas or resources left to discover, the game does lose some of its spark. It's hard to care too much about completing the last few tasks when you know that they just involve gathering a certain number of items in exchange for a monetary reward that has no value since you have nothing left to spend it on, or for outfits which you won't have a chance to wear since you've literally run out of things to do in the game.

Which kinda brings me to another minor criticism: despite how gorgeous the world is, a lot of it is very empty. What few subquests there are tend to give very paltry rewards, and a lot of the islands don't really seem to offer much after your initial visit. I was particularly disappointed with one quest to help clean up an island, after which exactly nothing happens to the location besides it looking slightly better. I feel like it wouldn't have been that hard to add a few unique individuals to various islands to make them more interesting, maybe like a chef who could give you hints about what recipes you're missing (since frankly there's no way I would have worked out some of the meal combinations without looking them up online).

Lastly, and maybe this is a little more controversial, I feel like the writing in this game could be a bit stronger. The central idea of looking after and helping out the various spirits is a great one, but not all the spirits are equally interesting, and I struggled to really care about a couple of them. I wasn't entirely sure whether we were supposed to understand that they were all people Stella knew from her own life, or whether some of them were just random people who happened to be along for the ride. I feel like relating them all to her would have made more sense. Even if they hadn't done that, I kinda wish that they had actually given Stella a personality through which she could engage and empathise with her passengers, because having her be a blank slate just means that all the interactions we have with them are one-sided. Like, it's hard for me to care that much about Elena when she's just an unapologetic bitch (pun intended), and I feel like that didn't have to be the case at all if they'd just made some effort to either explain why Stella is supposed to care about her (like maybe she was her teacher IRL), or had her at least push back against Elena's harshness to reveal why she's so prickly.

I don't want to end this review on a bad note, so I will that despite these complaints, I did very much enjoy this game and think it is well worth playing. Losing myself in it over the last few days has been a great pleasure, regardless of whatever minor complaints about it I may have.