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dkirschner's Spiritfarer (PC)

[May 24, 2021 10:00:12 AM]

Cute, charming, wonderful audio and visuals. This is a game about relationships, death, loss, love--hits a lot of emotions. I haven't ever played this much of a management game like this. But despite all that I did like about it, and how interesting and engaging it was at first, like all management games I've played it still became tedious and boring.

The premise of Spiritfarer is that you, Stella, are the new Spiritfarer. You help spirits resolve issues and then escort them through the Everdoor into whatever lies beyond. The game world is set on an ocean, so you captain a ship. You sail from island to island, point of interest to point of interest, exploring, talking, gathering resources. On your boat, you build farms, foundries, homes, kitchens, and all the other buildings you need to manage spirits and convert raw materials into processed items, with which you, of course, spend on upgrading the ship so that you can process the next type of item.

I am retiring the game after about 10 hours (it's roughly 25 hours just for the main story on Howlongtobeat). I have four or five spirits on my ship, plus a few sheep. I've explored what looks like about 25% of the map and gotten maybe 25% of the ship's upgrades. I haven't escorted any spirit to the Everdoor, but have done a bunch of quests. What I love about this game are the spirits and their stories. I also love exploring islands. As you get more spirits, you learn new exploration abilities (double jump, glide, etc.), which lets you find new items. I like that loop, the story/platforming/exploration loop.

What I dislike about the game, at this point, is the resource gathering and crafting loop, the general "management" aspect of the game. It was novel at first, building all these buildings and learning how to do all the little minigames to saw trees, weave wool, and smelt iron. It was cute cooking all the food and learning which type of food was this or that spirit's favorite. Now that I understand the loops, the novelty is worn off, and it's just "I have to keep feeding these damn spirits to keep them happy" and "I have to keep feeding these damn sheep so I can shear them for wool and so that they won't eat my crops" and "I have to water these rows of seeds over and over to get food or linen or whatever to cook it or weave it to get the next thing to get the upgrade to build the next thing to do the same thing with the next type of thing..."

Keeping up with all the things on the ship is detracting from the joys of pursuing the upgrades, of exploring, and of progressing the spirits' journeys. I wish the ratio of the things I like to the ship management and resource gathering stuff was different. I'm glad I realized that instead of continuing to mindlessly click on ore. Maybe after finishing Prey recently, I am particularly sensitive to filler and don't feel like doing it. Anyway, I watched my first spirit go through the Everdoor on YouTube and it was neat, but I am sure I wouldn't have cared all that much, as I don't seem to have the emotional connection to the spirits' stories that people who love this game have. I will remember the cute interactions between Stella and her cat and Stella and the spirits. It's still a charming game, and I'm glad I spent some time with it.