Spiritfarer, the gorgeous multi-genre tale released last month across platforms, achieves something that only one other game in my collection has. As with Breath of The Wild, I think I only fast-traveled twice. I didn’t want to skip any specific part; I was enjoying everything about it. It will take me five-minutes to sail to that point? Great, that’s five-minutes I can spend fishing, planting, slicing, cooking, or fermenting. Every part of what makes Spiritfarer great, and there are so many parts, is a joy and I didn’t want to rush any of it.
Spiritfarer sees you embody Stella, along with her incredibly cute cat Daffodil, and take on the role of the titular Spiritfarer. Set on a Wind Waker-esque archipelago you must collect the souls of the departed and help them complete their unfinished business in this world before escorting them to the Everdoor. This gateway to whatever comes after this life sits at the center of the map as a constant red reminder of the end goal of all of your mini-missions, and ultimately your over-arching one.
To help you on your way you have your trusty vessel which carries these souls and provides a base to complete your objectives. It is on this boat that you cook up food to keep the souls happy, build them houses, grow crops, smelt ore, ferment cabbage – I mean the options are nearly endless. This is where the two main genres (though Spiritfarer stubbornly refuses to be pigeon-holed) collide. This is one-part action platformer as you explore islands and find the souls (and secrets) and one-part farming sim. To help the souls on with their journey you must collect and utilise resources from across the world, found in shops and on islands and crafted on your boat. Unlike many examples of this genre though, it never gets chore-like or grindy. You don’t have to keep your orchard, chickens or kitchen working at all times – but merely find and make what you need for your specific objectives. I wasn’t constantly worrying about having to do my morning “chores”, but merely checking what I needed to do next on my task list. The loop is well balanced and mixes things up just enough to keep things from going stale.
Beyond a farm-sim and platformer, other genre stereotypes can be thrown at Spiritfarer comfortably. It is a collection of mini-games, with each resource collection or creation requiring a short exercise to complete. You must jump between dragon’s tails to get the minerals for smelting, catch lighting strikes in a bottle or follow the lines while chopping wood. Again, each of these is short enough, fun enough, and infrequent enough to not become boring but an interjection into your adventure. There is also progression of sorts. Stella improves her own abilities, unlocking new areas of exploration, as she finds new souls. She must also improve her boat – in size, speed and ability – to unlock new areas of the map by smashing through rocks and ice or navigating through previously impenetrable mist. This progression is unlocked gradually, and there is always enough in currently available areas to stop you from becoming impatient for abilities before they are ready.
This wonderous mish-mash of genres is set inside a world, and story, teeming with emotion and sweet sentiment. Each soul you encounter has a back-story that unfurls gently as you steer inevitably towards that Everdoor. You discover their lives, their regrets and their joy. You explore their past, hear of or meet important characters, and find out just what they think of the life they have lived. A lot of what you hear can be quite dark, but they are important issues to address, and there is plenty of light relief littered to stop things becoming too mawkish. A simple “hug” mechanic – initially just to improve their mood – was one I found myself using a lot as they, or I, needed cheering up. It is a purposelessly slow animation, an action that is centre to the game and shouldn’t be rushed. I can’t think of another mechanic in any game that I have taken so much time or thought over, or had such an impact on my mood. At one specific point, as I was bidding farewell to a soul, I remember specifically regretting not hugging that character enough. For any piece of media to impact you in such a way is incredibly impressive, and ultimately where the true power of Spiritfarer lies.
However, this is not Spiritfarer’s only strength. More prosaically Stella is a joy to control, zipping along wires and bouncing off platforms with the deftness and satisfying speed of a ninja-grim-reaper. Each new skill you unlock is easy to get the hang of, and it’s as satisfying as ever being able to reach those previously tantalizingly off-limit areas. The world you explore is also beautifully realized, and surprisingly varied. You will uncover secrets and souls in cozy Japanese mountain villages, Nordic fishing hamlets as well as bustling “cities”, labyrinthine quarries and misty factories. At one point you even get involved in a trade dispute between workers and a greedy CEO. This same art style also creates the hugely expressive souls you find, each inhabiting a different animal persona. My personal favorite, Atul, was a large toad whose joy at getting given food was palpable. The score is minimalist but works well, providing a quaint backdrop to the spiritual adventure.
Beyond the main story, there is also a deceptively huge game here. The critical path will take around 25 hours, but you feel you are only touching the surface. There are recipes to complete, fish to catch, plants to grow and mini-games to master. Each island lets you know what you’ve discovered, and how much of it remains uncovered. To find every treasure chest, catch every fish and unlock every collectible you are likely looking at 50 hours or more. To encourage you to dig a little deeper there is even a “Collector” (a walrus, naturally) who rewards you for each milestone passed for collectibles. You find a lot naturally as the story progresses, but by the time credits rolled I had lots more left on my to-do list.
Unfortunately, there are a few, mostly small, issues. Spiritfarer’s main weakness is that it feels – like some of my early recipes – a bit underdone. The whole game, story and emotion are here, but unfortunately so are quite a few glitches and bugs that needed ironing out. Characters often freeze when you speak to them, meaning I had to restart from my last save (luckily it checkpoints frequently). Souls on your boat can just disappear without explanation for a few days at a time, despite the game requiring you to speak to them to progress. The day-cycle that governs so much of what you can and can’t do skips around, which proves frustrating as you can’t travel at night. I have also heard of a game-breaking bug that requires a full restart – this didn’t happen to me fortunately but it’s worrying knowing it’s out there. I am sure a patch will come along to fix these issues, and they certainly didn’t ruin the experience, but they are frequent and obvious enough to deserve mentioning.
There are a couple of more minor, and subjective, gripes as well. Near the end, the cycle can begin to feel formulaic. Pick up a soul, build them a dwelling, upgrade it (three times) and then do a bespoke resource gathering/exploration mission. It does keep things fresh enough in what resources are required, and where you find them, to stop things becoming too stale but it did get quite predictable. Equally, and I’m going to keep things spoiler-free here, I also felt you have the option to end the game too early. I’m being purposefully vague, but you are given the option to very obviously roll credits before your overall mission feels complete. You can ignore this of course, and if you do roll credits then you can start straight back up from your last save, but it felt like an odd option to have open. This may be a message on the never-ending cycle of death, or just to stop the game outstaying its welcome, but it can make for a slightly unsatisfying (if optional) ending.
Thankfully these small technical and narrative complaints aren’t enough to dim the joy that is Spiritfarer. It’s a strange word to use about a game which has a narrative, and ultimate goal, centered on death. But joy is what I felt while playing. That bittersweet joy of the memory of a lost friend or family member maybe, but joy none the less. Joy in the exploring, the unraveling and the farming and crafting. But more so joy in the stories, the emotions and the characters you uncover. It’s a game not only built around coming to terms with our mortality, but also understanding the motivations and fragility of our emotions while we’re still here. It feels like a game that should also just be played once thoroughly. Restarting to spend more time with the once-departed souls feels like cheating death a little. Forget the fast-travel accolade I opened with, that is the biggest compliment I could pay it. To turn these works of fiction and art into characters whose lives, and deaths, feel so real is a breathless achievement. And to build such a tight, addictive and genre-dispelling game around them is even more astonishing. Coming out of nowhere, this surprise launch went very quickly from oddity to one of my favorite games of the year – I cannot recommend this adventure in purgatory enough.