Spiritfarer made me ask a difficult question of myself, for me personally, just how important is gameplay for a video game. I know that sounds like a stupid question but stick with me for a little bit. Spiritfarer at it's core is a survival/crafting game about gathering resources to craft upgrades and progress through the game, and I found it's repetitive loop of gathering/crafting to be very irritating and bothersome quite a lot of the time. There are hours I spent with this game where I became very frustrated and bored that would normally just end with me uninstalling the game and never returning.

...and yet I can't deny that I found myself still falling in love with this game.

Because the game really is more than it's gameplay a lot of the time. The art and animation is always a pure delight to look at, the soundtrack is beautifully moving, and the writing is some of the most poignant and moving I've ever seen in any piece of media. There are many moments that I'm probably going to carry with me for years to come.

But was all of this worth it? I loved the game for it's art but simply tolerated it for it's gameplay. My gut reaction is to recommend Spiritfarer but I'm confident that there will be a lot of people for whom the gameplay will be simply too tedious for them.