A lovely resource management game with a great and surprisingly emotional story.
I really enjoyed my time with Spirifarer - the gameplay, story, and the spirits themselves were all wonderful. It’s a different take on the resource management sim and it’s fun having to juggle farming materials for upgrades, managing requests, and taking care of the spirits aboard your ship. Unfortunately, I don’t think it does a great job of balancing the resource management gameplay so that it is consistently engaging throughout the entire story. The end of the game was a bit dull for me as all my upgrades and miscellaneous tasks were done so most of my time was spent sitting idle on a boat as I sailed from port to port waiting to finish out the last spirits’ stories.
The stories you experience along your journey are great. I definitely grew more than a little attached to many of the spirits, so saying goodbye to them ended up being a bit emotional. On the other hand, some of the other spirits were so insufferable I couldn’t wait to get them off my ship. But overall, Spiritfarer made me more emotional than most other video games do.
The game could also do with a number of quality of life improvements as well. Like you can’t see the map to check resources at your location unless you’re on the boat. Weird choice. I also had enormous performance issues on Switch. Not only would I see frequent framerate drops, but I had at least one crash per game session and, due to the game’s infrequent autosaves and lack of a manual save option, would result in a decent chunk of lost progress.
Overall, those gripes are easy to overlook as they don’t really impact the moment-to-moment joy of playing this game too heavily. I didn’t expect the game to make me as emotional as it did but I had no shortage of tears in my eyes when I finished the story.
+ The spirits are (mostly) great and I loved being a part of their journeys
+ Satisfying resource management and upgrade progression
+ Overall relaxing game with great music
- Could use some quality of life improvements
- Performance issues and crashes on the Nintendo Switch
- End of the game gets tedious
I really enjoyed my time with Spirifarer - the gameplay, story, and the spirits themselves were all wonderful. It’s a different take on the resource management sim and it’s fun having to juggle farming materials for upgrades, managing requests, and taking care of the spirits aboard your ship. Unfortunately, I don’t think it does a great job of balancing the resource management gameplay so that it is consistently engaging throughout the entire story. The end of the game was a bit dull for me as all my upgrades and miscellaneous tasks were done so most of my time was spent sitting idle on a boat as I sailed from port to port waiting to finish out the last spirits’ stories.
The stories you experience along your journey are great. I definitely grew more than a little attached to many of the spirits, so saying goodbye to them ended up being a bit emotional. On the other hand, some of the other spirits were so insufferable I couldn’t wait to get them off my ship. But overall, Spiritfarer made me more emotional than most other video games do.
The game could also do with a number of quality of life improvements as well. Like you can’t see the map to check resources at your location unless you’re on the boat. Weird choice. I also had enormous performance issues on Switch. Not only would I see frequent framerate drops, but I had at least one crash per game session and, due to the game’s infrequent autosaves and lack of a manual save option, would result in a decent chunk of lost progress.
Overall, those gripes are easy to overlook as they don’t really impact the moment-to-moment joy of playing this game too heavily. I didn’t expect the game to make me as emotional as it did but I had no shortage of tears in my eyes when I finished the story.
+ The spirits are (mostly) great and I loved being a part of their journeys
+ Satisfying resource management and upgrade progression
+ Overall relaxing game with great music
- Could use some quality of life improvements
- Performance issues and crashes on the Nintendo Switch
- End of the game gets tedious