I've always been infatuated with various interpretations of life after death, or the passing of our spirits or souls, so I was immediately intrigued by Spiritfarer when it was announced in uh, I think 2019 game awards? I forget. It was one of the few that I really looked forward to.
The intro to this game is fantastic in my eyes, it's slow but feels deliberate and starts to set the tone the game will have right away. Very somber, bittersweet; absolutely my thing.
It doesn't waste time introducing us to our first spirit, who is the main protagonist's sister(?). I love their interactions and the dialogue in the game for the most part, it feels genuine.
Unfortunately it's also not long after this that they begin to start piling chores on the player, which honestly they're mostly fun---one at a time, once or twice, but the problem becomes now I'm focusing more on this bloated management sim that was tied to this wonderful narrative on death. It bothers me particularly because a lot of the ways you gather resources etc. all feel like neat little minigames, but then they ask you to do these minigames dozens upon dozens of times, and they're very simple minigames; I can do most of them blindfolded except maybe the saw and loom without any exaggeration. There's also the time it takes for you to travel to and from any location, which while you can offset this as you progress, you don't really do so meaningfully until over halfway through the game and most of the game is comprised entirely of fetch quests.
God, I love Spiritfarer's premise so fucking much. I can't convey how much I want a game like this, I just wish it were structured closer to something like Night in the Woods and focused more on its excellent character interactions instead of figuring out which side of the map you need to be on for that one log you're missing to fill out a checkbox to progress a character's otherwise lovely arc.
The intro to this game is fantastic in my eyes, it's slow but feels deliberate and starts to set the tone the game will have right away. Very somber, bittersweet; absolutely my thing.
It doesn't waste time introducing us to our first spirit, who is the main protagonist's sister(?). I love their interactions and the dialogue in the game for the most part, it feels genuine.
Unfortunately it's also not long after this that they begin to start piling chores on the player, which honestly they're mostly fun---one at a time, once or twice, but the problem becomes now I'm focusing more on this bloated management sim that was tied to this wonderful narrative on death. It bothers me particularly because a lot of the ways you gather resources etc. all feel like neat little minigames, but then they ask you to do these minigames dozens upon dozens of times, and they're very simple minigames; I can do most of them blindfolded except maybe the saw and loom without any exaggeration. There's also the time it takes for you to travel to and from any location, which while you can offset this as you progress, you don't really do so meaningfully until over halfway through the game and most of the game is comprised entirely of fetch quests.
God, I love Spiritfarer's premise so fucking much. I can't convey how much I want a game like this, I just wish it were structured closer to something like Night in the Woods and focused more on its excellent character interactions instead of figuring out which side of the map you need to be on for that one log you're missing to fill out a checkbox to progress a character's otherwise lovely arc.