This game is a cumbersome mess. The opening is excruciating, with tons of slow, repetitive animations. The world is rife with invisible walls and dumb plot obstacles. Dialogue often gives the player multiple options that make no difference. Running consumes stamina even when not in combat (imagine always walking everywhere in Harvest Moon). Combat offers no defensive movement options, making every encounter a DPS grind. The story and setting are interesting, but the visuals are awful and frequently stutter. Basically this game is a collection of many of my gaming bugbears, with very little to redeem it.

Spiritfarer is a cozy resource management/base building game. The animations are gorgeous and the music is calming, if a bit banal. The game centers primarily around the characters, all of whom are well-written but forgettably inoffensive. Maintaining good relationships and progressing the character arcs requires numerous resources, which are gathered and processed by completing mediocre minigames. Traveling while balancing these tasks is initially a fun juggling act, but it's easy to get stuck with grinding for a particular resource or traveling to a distant location without being able to progress other goals. Depending on the level of complexity or difficulty a player is looking for this could be worthwhile, but I found myself hitting too many tedious road bumps.

I don't think it's fair to rate this, as I haven't played nearly enough to rank it amongst my completed list of games, but man... Nothing short of disappointed with Ghost of Tsushima. While I can lay the blame on the game itself for being so vapid to play and Sucker Punch for developing something so milquetoast after the InFamous titles, it's honestly all on me for fooling myself into thinking I'd enjoy an open world game for once. It can be nice to play a game like this every now and then to experience what's in vogue, but it's probably for the best that I dip out now and find something that I like playing wholeheartedly, rather than slog through a 30 hour epic solely because the same development house made games I liked 10+ years ago.