When I started playing Spiritfarer I found it such a cozy and charming place to be it became my regular pre-bed ritual; something I could unwind with after my daily trials. The beautiful art, serene soundtrack, and lack of urgency were quite relaxing. I was growing veggies, cooking food, coasting from island to island on Everlight power. I was chatting with goofy characters, upgrading my ship, talking to Spritis, getting to know them, making their favorite foods. Then a Spirit asked me to take them to the Everdoor, and not long after they were gone. I was surprised to find the Spirit’s absence hit me hard. I’d find myself making their favorite meal, only to remember no one on the ship would enjoy it quite the same. I’d walk by their house, dark, empty. Veggies I no longer needed were piling up. I was disrupted, my routine was broken, I missed that Spirit. I’m not ashamed to admit I felt a sense of grief which called to mind my own personal experiences with losing loved ones. That’s when I was hooked.
What struck me most about my sudden sense of loss was I didn’t care much for that first Spirit. Gwen was haughty, overbearing, and aloof. Despite the lack of connection, I still missed Gwen when she was gone. Spiritfarer built routines around an individual, got me used to performing certain functions, behaviors, responses, then it removed the subject. Abruptly my staunchly habit driven human brain felt a sense of absence, having lost a set of algorithms it was so used to performing. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me set the stage.
In Spiritfarer you play as the Spiritfarer, a young woman named Stella who is tasked with shepherding Spirits to whatever comes next. The game opens with Stella and her cat Daffodil canoeing down a preternaturally red river when they cross paths with then Spiritfarer Charon. Without much fuss Charon entitles Stella the new Spiritfarer, gives her the power of the Everlight (the game’s all in one magical tool and power source), shows her the gateway to the great beyond ,the Everdoor, and departs in a moment of solemn beauty. It’s a lovely intro that gives a little taste of what’s to come, but it mostly plays itself. Not until Charon departs does the real gameplay begin.
Spiritfarer’s gameplay is a bit hard to describe as it’s a hodgepodge of a few different genres. The main gameplay loop involves traveling between a series of islands in a vast ocean, finding wayward Spirits, gathering and crafting resources, and maintaining your relationships. The goal is to make the Spirits on your ship as comfortable and happy as possible before they decide it’s time to travel to the Everdoor. Making Spirits cozy and cheerful requires you discover each one’s likes and dislikes: food, living accommodations, behaviors of other Spirits, and most adorably how much they like to be hugged. The more comfortable you make Spirits, the more they reveal about themselves, and the more the narrative unfolds. For example, a Spirit may open up to you after you make them one of their favorite snacks because everyone, even the dead, love to eat.
Every Spirit has certain foods they like, foods they dislike, and a favorite dish. Discovering the finer points of each Spirit’s tastes is its own challenge. Some Spirits will share their preferences outright, others are coy. The best way to learn is through a combination of trial-and-error and making observations about each Spirit’s personality. Having expend effort to learn a Spirit’s tastes is one of the elements that builds that emotional connection I was referring to earlier; an emotional algorithm. It forced me to consider the needs of the Spirits and began constructing a loop, a habit around their eating.
Feeding into the food loop (pun intended) are gathering and crafting. Most meals must be cooked, with few exceptions. You must travel to various locations gathering or buying the right ingredients. Aboard your ship you can produce other ingredients, by growing fruits, vegetables, grains, or aging dairy to make yogurts and cheeses. Cooking takes place on the ship and involves combining different ingredients in an Everlight powered oven. Some recipes require multiple stages of cooking; cooking an ingredient that will be combined with something else then thrown back in the oven to make a finished dish. Each one of these activities has its own little routine, a looplette that feeds into the larger game loop. Again this all drives the emotional connection. You’re glad Atul, Stella’s uncle (which the game presents as a jolly rotund frog), enjoys the fried chicken you made because it took effort not only to learn he loves fried chicken, but also to gather all the materials and prepare the meal. It took me ages to figure out where to get the oil to fry that cursed bird meat. the other activities in Spiritfarer, building dwellings, chatting with and hugging Spirits, all follow a similar pattern as the cooking, the gathering, and the crafting. It’s not long before you’re a routine machine busily making Spirits as happy as possible.
Making Spirits happy, however, isn’t just about maxing out some arbitrary stats for the sake of winning, it changes their behavior. Spirits you forget to hug, or don’t feed, will become depressed and loaf around despondently. If they’re happy, they may give you gifts, or even perform certain actions like playing a favorite instrument. Those actions in turn may influence other Spirits. There is a sense of community on your little floating city, that is enhanced by Stella running a gambit of chores trying (sometimes in vain) to keep everyone satisfied.
Despite Stella’s best efforts, some Spirits just don’t get along. A joyful Spirit playing their favorite instrument may cheer one neighbor up but annoy another. A disgruntled Spirit may bully their shipmates, trying to bring everyone down to their emotional levels. It seems impossible to max out everyone’s happiness on the first playthrough, which I take as a reflection of a hard life lesson to learn; you can’t make everyone happy.
The connecting thread, though, through all the activities performed is that sense of repetition. For a lot of games overt repetition is tedious, and smacks of padding for time, but for Spiritfarer it is a strength. It reminds me of the adage that you never truly understand how precious something is until it is gone. Each time a Spirit left for the Everdoor I lost another set of routines, and it made me realized how much I had enjoyed them. Near the end of the game, with only a few Spirits left, I started to feel empty. I was overflowing with trepidation. All games end, but I never felt that impending sense of finality as much as in Spiritfarer. I was a routine machine with no more algorithms to follow. To put it more in the language of the game, I was a caretaker without anyone to whom I could administer care; that was a powerful feeling. When I eventually made the last journey to the Everdoor it felt right, like I’d done what I needed to do, and I was content. I hope that’s how it will really feel at the end.