It doesn't bring me any joy to write this. When Spiritfarer is a Work that's About Things, it's exciting and fresh, thoughtful and tender. Unfortunately, most of the time it's not about anything at all.

I will readily acknowledge that this is, in part, a 'me' problem. There's long been a disconnect between me and games like Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon. What is intended to be a gentle day-night cycle of reaping and sowing becomes a stressful exercise in efficiency. An hour is something that has value to me, and games that cannot balance a calculation against that value quickly begin to grate. And most of the time, that's just fine. I simply do not play games that are about those kinds of experiences. The trouble with Spiritfarer is that it is striving to be something else.

Spiritfarer claims to be a game about grieving, about the experience of being around for the end of someone's life. It promises to explore this from myriad angles, to allow you to genuinely grow close to characters in their brief afterlife, and to experience what it's like to farewell them. As much as a video game can, I do think it succeeds on this front. The charming, diverse character designs are immediately fun to watch, and the premise allows the writers to cut to the chase. Where other games might need to work harder to earn moments where characters reminisce on their life to the player, here it just, like, makes sense. They're dead. Why wouldn't they be preoccupied with the life they've lost?

It's that diversity of character that really drew me in. I was looking forward to seeing so many perspectives on this very real, significant experience, and the few chances I got did not disappoint. There was an initial period where the fantastical seascapes and vague allusions to the player character's history did not make sense, but after receiving a Spirit Flower - a parting gift from the passengers you ferry to the end - I was immediately on board with what the game was presenting me with. It felt genuinely exciting.

In a moment of pure tastelessness, you then immediately use up the Spirit Flower as a crafting ingredient to upgrade your boat so it can drive through ice.

Which brings me to the two biggest problems with Spiritfarer, and the things that will probably keep me from going back to play more of it; the progression, and the overabundance of 'mechanics'.

Let's start with the latter. There's a question hanging over Spiritfarer as a concept; what do you, the player, actually do? What does a Spiritfarer, one who accompanies the dead to the end of their existence, actually do? The answer that the game provides is deeply unsatisfactory. Sure, in principle, providing comfortable housing and tasty food is a wonderful thing to do in that role. What that looks like in practice, however, is primarily the accumulation of resources through extremely dull, extremely repetitive busywork. For example:

You plant a cotton seed in your garden. That seed, exactly like all the other seeds you plant, needs watering three times a day. Naturally, when you wake up in the morning, about a third of a day has passed, so your plants need water. You water them by pressing the interact button - each instance takes a few seconds of watching an animation - and do so again at about midday. You water them just before you go to bed. This cycle continues more or less as long as you're playing the game, so pretty much every night, you'll water the plants, go to sleep, wake up, and water the exact same plants again. Every single in-game day, if you want to play efficiently.

Or, let's say you need metals. To get the ore, you have to stand next to a rock and hold the interact button for the correct duration. Hold it too long, and you sit there for several seconds while an animation of your character falling over plays out. Once you have the ore, you can take it to the smelter on the ship, where you engage in a slightly different variety of busywork by running back and forth between two different interact button presses to keep a needle in the sweet spot on a dial.

You get the idea. None of these things really have anything to do with being a Spiritfarer. There's the distant idea that the fruits of your labor will make the people you're ferrying happy, but the actual act has nothing to do with them. You're tucked in a corner away from them, waiting for animations to finish. There are moments where they're arguably involved - happy passengers can provide you with small, infrequent benefits to these systems - but for the most part it's just, like, pressing the interact button and waiting for an action to finish.

This wouldn't be too much of a problem, if it weren't for the fact that the hours spent in these activities drastically outnumbers the time spent with the story. I have played for 14 hours - about halfway through the game, as I understand it - and maybe two or three hours of that have had any bearing on the characters I'm meant to be playing the game for. It's not impossible for a game to spread the story out between activities that aren't specifically related to it. Hades does an excellent job of a similar approach. The difference is that when you're playing Hades, you get to play Hades. Here, it's just pressing buttons and waiting.

And, unfortunately, you do need to engage with these mechanics. Each passenger on your ship has a questline, of sorts. They have objectives that they'll want you to complete to help them get comfortable, to help them overcome whatever's keeping them anchored to this plane of existence, to take care of their needs when they can't do it themselves. While arguably video-gamey, this is, in itself, a fine way to structure things. The problem is the tangled knot of progression that prevents you from pushing ahead with any aspect of the story. They obscure it, but there is a hard, harsh order to which you must progress the game. A character's demands will require obtaining a specific resource, which can only be obtained at specific locations, all of which are behind a specific obstacle that requires a specific upgrade, which cannot be obtained without completing the stories of two other characters, which have their own endless series of requirements, waiting periods, etc. etc.

It creates a situation where you are mostly progressing a single objective at a time, in a game where doing a single thing at a time is incredibly, insufferably boring, and means most of the people aboard your ship have nothing to do but ask you for food and remind you that they're waiting for you to finish something you can't even start yet. Sometimes the single thing you're doing is just waiting for the next story event to happen! When a story does progress, it's rewarding and interesting, but the things you have to do dig up that small piece of actual art are so insufferably, endlessly boring.

I find it frustrating, because none of this feels like an accident. It feels like this progression, these activities were deliberately crafted to be this way. Spiritfarer is described as a 'cozy' game, which puts it in a specific trend of games that, inspired by the aforementioned Stardew Valley, share many of these problems for me. Again, that's normally just a matter of taste, but in the pursuit of 'cozy', however one may feel about it, the developers have left behind the things that are actually special about what they were making. They didn't fall into it accidentally. They deliberately made a game that is deeply at odds with itself, that fills the time you give it with meaningless chaff that does nothing to further it as a work of art. Spiritfarer does not need gathering and crafting - or at least, does not need this much of it. There's something real special here, a wonderful and rich cake that I'd be all too happy to devour if it weren't for the unconscionably thick shell of fondant around it.

There is nothing wrong with a 12 hour game. If I can spend that much time with a game and enjoy even just most of it, that's time well spent. Spiritfarer could be an excellent 12 hour game. Instead, it promises twice that, and spreads what excellence it has far too thin to stomach. I'm profoundly disappointed.

Beautiful game with enjoyable and satisfying gameplay, gorgeous visuals, and individualistic, interesting characters that make you excited to find out who you're going to meet next. Unfortunately I think I encountered a few bugs that stopped the ending feeling as emotional as it could be, as I was unable to finish Buck, Jackie and Moth Girl's quests. It just irked my inner completionist as I ultimately had to complete the main storyline without them. Some characters felt they had more put into them than others, but I think that's sometimes to be expected with a large cast. Without those little things stalling some of my enjoyment, this would have probably been 5 stars, but otherwise an absolutely heartfelt, wonderous game that feels like an experience, not just an entertainment media.