How Spiritfarer Leans on the Player’s Lived Experience with Death
A scattergun approach prevents a good game from achieving its full potential
I have been surrounded by death my entire life.
I don’t mean that in a scary, foreboding, final-destination-plank-through-a-car-window sense — but quite literally. My parents have both worked in palliative care for most of their lives. For my entire life, my Dad has run an organisation all around supporting people through grief, bereavement and dying. Death and dying have been part of my language since I was three years old and wrote a five page story-book about how my rabbit died, leaving me crying “for three days straight.”
When I step back, I wonder whether this is partly why Spiritfarer has left me feeling so disappointed despite me being the ideal audience for the game.
Spiritfarer has been on my list to play for a long time, ever since I saw the first trailer. I even tweeted when I started playing about how much I felt it was going to affect me and be a wonderful experience. Instead of brimming with joy at the finish line, excited to leap into conversations around death, I’ve walked away feeling let down.
Let me be clear — as an independent developer myself, making games is incredibly hard. Making a bad game is hard, let alone a great game. I also don’t think Spiritfarer is a bad game. I do think it’s worth playing. Whenever I approach a game, I’m constantly bouncing between my feelings as a player and my feelings as a creator. In this instance, my frustrations with it as a player aren’t matched in general sentiment, it seems. It’s partly for this reason why I feel it’s important to have a conversation about it. If I feel this way, others might too; maybe that can inform future creators. I commend Thunder Lotus (the developers) for tackling a topic like death in a way that largely avoids religious contexts, but I wish there had been a firmer approach, especially around the storytelling and characterisation.
Jack of all spades
Spiritfarer is pitched as a ‘cozy management game about death’. As Stella, you act as ferrymaster to the deceased, building a boat with everything you need, caring for spirit friends, and performing tasks for them until they’re ready to be escorted into the afterlife. As a longtime fan of management games and (strangely) death, I was looking forward to growing my garden, tending to my boat and caring for its inhabitants. However, I found very quickly that there was limited depth to any of these interactions, especially as my play time grew and grew. Spiritfarer attempts to cover so many audience interests — management, simulation, narrative, platformer — as well as player motivations — completion, discovery, challenge, fantasy, story — that it ends up only half-achieving these lofty goals across all elements. For players who happen to have a finger in all those pies, they’re elated — they get a half-platformer, half-feels trip — but for me at least, it feels like it never quite reaches the heights it aims for (despite all the platforming).
Each constituent part of Spiritfarer is almost there.
I found that almost everything — the mechanics, the storytelling, the optimisation, the length, were so close and yet so far in terms of feeling great. Some, like optimisation, can perhaps be explained away by me playing on Switch, which seemed to have far more issues with bugs than its PC equivalent (at least judging by the subreddit). But other flaws can’t be explained by bugs and are woven into the fabric of the game itself.
It’s an experience that leans heavily on its stunning visual style to carry the more lacklustre elements, with the animations having a vibrancy and elation to them; the character designs are beautiful and strong. Many of the interactions, however, like catching tuna or chasing lightning are done only once or twice because you then have enough materials to never do it again. Some events are so tedious in their repeated execution due to clunky movement that you’ll do anything to avoid them.
The game designer and producer in me comes to a few conclusions. Immediately the mitigating factors play on my mind. Perhaps the team got to a point of realising that certain mechanics weren’t necessarily super fun in repetition — but priorities shift in game development and I imagine there were hundreds that simultaneously became more important. I imagine taking any out would’ve compromised the rest of the story, and I understand living with the compromise — I’m sure I would have done the same. However, these not particularly enjoyable challenges — combined with mechanics and abilities that often don’t behave the way they are meant to (dashing in the wrong direction, feeling sluggish or clunky when trying to jump up or drop down) — made them less of an exciting change of pace and more of a chore.
Let me be clear — as an independent developer myself, making games is incredibly hard. Making a bad game is hard, let alone a great game.
Expectation versus reality
One reason why these challenges frustrated me was the misalignment between my expectations of the game and what the game itself presented. The pitch mentions nothing about platforming or mechanic skills. Sure, these are a relatively small gameplay component, but they’re frustrating due to the unclean nature of their mechanics. The trailer shows snippets of floating in the air or bouncing on umbrellas; it looks fluid, easy, and simple compared to how it feels in practice (at least on console). It’s not to say that quests or movements weren’t achievable — or even relatively easy — but the clunkiness and lack of guidance surrounding many of them ultimately let them down in a major way.
I’ve also had numerous conversations with friends who are all surprised at the length of the game. Many of us had the sense that this was a short, contained experience. I firmly believe it would have been better if that had been the case. Instead, I found myself in the last five hours of a twenty hour play-through, very much feeling that the experience had long overstayed its welcome. At this point, the game firmly occupies diminishing returns territory. The timing problem is compounded due to the way certain quest lines are “delayed”. I often felt like I was simply filling time waiting for my next task with nothing to actually manage in those moments. Had the game been ten hours long, I might have felt differently about it overall. It eventually became a struggle to finish — and when combined with the lack of clarity around next steps — I eventually said “stuff it” and just took Stella to the Everdoor without completing some of the final tasks and quest lines.
I found that almost everything — the mechanics, the storytelling, the optimisation, the length, were so close and yet so far in terms of feeling great.
Trouble in the afterlife
Spiritfarer also happens to be one of the buggier games I’ve played in a long time — at least on Switch. I hit more than one point where I was completely bricked in progression, forced to relaunch and lose progress with some quests perpetually stuck. At one point, Alice bugged on the prow and I could not walk her back home, meaning the next day when she chided me for forgetting her I had to feel terrible even though I had no choice in the matter. This goes further into some quality of life elements that I’m sure were acknowledged and prioritised, but add up — not being able to read town names on the map when moving around via the bus was an annoyance, the camera placement frequently misbehaving and zooming in and out in pivotal moments such as time trials or platforming. Those I can pretty easily forgive, especially in the context of a bigger, enjoyable game — but one quest sent me to the wrong location which I only discovered when googling because I was so unsure — to find out that the coordinates given in game were completely wrong.
The minimal guidance across the game is clear from simply glancing at the Spiritfarer subreddit. Some would argue there’s satisfaction in working out some of these things, but a lot of engagement with the mechanics was just unclear. Smithings responsiveness to different kinds of hits was often hard to gauge, or it was too boring to wait for your hammer to stop glowing red, so I ended up eventually just thwacking at the thing until it did what I needed to progress. This might speak to my impatience more than anything else. Because you can collect spirits in any order, you often would be at different stages of progression, unable to figure out exactly where you should be heading next or who you should be talking to. This lack of guidance combined with the bugs I encountered meant that some of the moments that should’ve hit hard, didn’t — at one point, a character disappears rather than being taken through the Everdoor. Another doesn’t want to leave when you reasonably expect they should compared to previous spirits. I then couldn’t tell if these were intentional story elements without googling, lessening their impact dramatically.
These issues extend to the story and lore, too. The early game did a great job -I liked Gwen, the feisty and strong deer character you begin with who happens to be a representation of your sibling. I adored Summer, a meditative, gentle snake who plays music to your crops and battles literal and metaphorical dragons. I felt like I got a true sense of these two as characters — I was interested to learn more about them and I got to know them in a decent amount of depth. So comparatively, when I finished the game and didn’t feel like I had a sense of Stella’s life and journey, nor of the full characterisation of the other shipmates, I was let down. In fact, after Gwen and Summer, the characterisation is relatively lacking for all the characters that follow — unless you’ve had personal experience with that individual’s trauma or issue, like dementia.
Lore wise, you’re fed minimal extra information. Most of the side quests pay glims only — the games currency — rather than telling me more about the world or the individuals inhabiting it. I would often sail from one side of the map to the other, to be told thanks and thrown money with no additional storytelling, to the point that I ended up ignoring most side quests. Some of the most interesting early mechanics (Summer teaching you to play music to the garden to help it grow, for example) are either never touched on again or particularly irrelevant after the fact.
…the game leans too heavily on the players understanding of death to add meaning…
Don’t fear the reaper
Most spirits I farewelled with absolutely no heaviness after these initial few, and this is where my biggest issue with the game lies: I feel the game leans too heavily on the players understanding of death to add meaning, rather than as a reality for crafting interesting and unique characters. That reality is then used to imbue the death of those characters (or those we love) with meaning. Spiritfarer relies on your emotion and personal engagement with death to make a valuable story, rather than creating characters you care for regardless. I’m so mixed on this — I’m thrilled that people are forced to reckon with their understanding of death, but saddened that there was such minimal storytelling created around each character as the game goes on. I wanted to feel as though I was losing something when I lost each of these characters, and instead that loss often felt shallow as I’d only got to know them as always-hungry archetypes. This is worst of all in regards to Hades, aka Death themselves. After warning you many times they’ll be back for you — becoming a heavy figure of anxiety — there’s no interaction or final visuals when you do send Stella off. Instead, the game ends almost instantly, making it all feel rather anticlimactic in its conclusion. I literally had to put the console down and walk away.
…the characterisation is relatively lacking for all the characters that follow — unless you’ve had personal experience with that individual’s trauma or issue, like dementia.
Reliance on the player’s lived experience
The team has already (rightfully) been called out for their representation of Gustav, a beautiful art-collecting bird who reveals midway that in life, he used a wheelchair. He lamented the way in which his life basically ended when he was ‘confined’ to the chair — ignoring that many individuals have affection and joy for their chairs, and disregarding the full complexities of chronic illnesses.
Kudos to the team for acknowledging and accepting this, and additionally for at least trying to be inclusive and representative.
I was truly pleased to see their representation of Stanley, a clearly autistic and wonderfully excitable young character who engages with Stella much in the way my own brother has with me in the past. This does serve to prove my earlier point, though: I was forced to carry my own understanding into the game to give it meaning, rather than the game actually imbuing these characters and interactions with meaning unto themselves. Stanley was special because he reminded me of my brother, my own understanding of kids like him, their experiences, frustrations and fears — not because he exhibited any layers of complexity that might evoke those feelings regardless of my personal life experience. I projected my feelings for my brother and my love for him onto Stanley; essentially filling in the gaps to make him a more rounded character.
The ambiguity around much of the game means that in order to glean much understanding of the lore and story, you’ll need to have the art book handy. It brings to bear additional context that you might otherwise only find through the community on the subreddit. I love games that allow audiences to draw their own conclusions, but if the game had clearly communicated the fact that Stella is supposed to be an end-of-life nurse, the way I regard the story overall might have shifted slightly. Some may argue that the game telegraphed this through the images depicted during the Hades conversations, but I found them almost impossible to parse — the colours were lacking in contrast so much that I struggled to understand what I was looking at and who was being referenced. This meant I was often left with a sense of confusion rather than clarity.
I was truly pleased to see their representation of Stanley, a clearly autistic and wonderfully excitable young character who engages with Stella much in the way my own brother has with me in the past.
Final thoughts
Spiritfarer is by no means a bad game. It’s worth playing. And I’m hopeful that it will inspire many other titles to explore similarly difficult topics and themes. I’m even more hopeful that it will inspire genuine conversation. I do wish it had leaned into a few specific areas rather than trying to touch on all conceivable topics, doing none of them real justice.
The Bus Seal is easily my favourite character of the year, thanks to their overflowing positivity and energy…and a honking horn. The music is uplifting, particularly in the moments when a soul passes over; these sequences are beautiful as the camera shifts perspective and the music swells. There are thousands of potential desktop wallpapers, gentle moments, and a great deal of good in Spiritfarer generally (especially in the first five or so hours) to make it a worthwhile play through.
I don’t regret buying or playing the game, I just feel it didn’t deliver on the promises I had hoped for. As a creator, I wanted to walk away with new reflections and feelings; ways to muse on a difficult year that forced many of us to cope with the concepts of death and loss, and to contemplate our own mortality and the reality of being alive. Perhaps that is too much to expect, but then again, Spiritfarer did make me hopeful given everything I saw in the lead up to its release.
I imagine that if you haven’t reflected on death before, this could be a transformative title, as it seems to have been for many when you consider the overwhelmingly positive reviews it’s received. I’m glad it had that impact.
Spiritfarer offered moments where I thought about those I loved and lost, and considered all the love and loss to come. For many, that might be enough. But for me — especially as a person who contemplates love and loss every day — it didn’t quite reach the lofty heights I had hoped for.
