I'll be frank, I expected a lot from Spiritfarer, and I was disappointed. Going in, I had heard good things, mainly about how the game was so emotional that it made many people cry. Good things! A lot of talk about how the game had excellent portrayals of death. I was intrigued! The game not only did not manage to live up to my overinflated expectations, but I think Spiritfarer didn't live up to its own great premise.

First of all, Spiritfarer has far more gameplay than I expected. I spent the vast majority of my time engaging with the management sim, rather than the story. In fact I think its rather misleading to present Spiritfarer solely as a game about helping people in the afterlife move on, when the vast majority of your time will be doing management. This management is made up of completing simple, repetitive, minigames, running around your ship giving meals to people, some very basic platforming challenges that give resources as a reward, and traveling to different islands that hold more repetitive, boring, minigames. I wasn't even out of the tutorial before I was tired of the sawing down a tree minigame, and oh boy I had to saw down a lot more trees after that point. The other minigames aren't much better. I spent so much time water plants in Spiritfarer that I feel tired even looking at a hose in real life. The management simulation aspect of the game is entirely beholden to the resource gathering minigames. There is no real challenge in managing anything, each resource requirement is just a number if times you will have to play a certain, drawn out, unsatisfying, minigame before you're allowed to progress the story.

As Stella takes on more residents for her boat, her residents will make requests of her, which will all require resource gathering, with more expensive and rare resources needed as you go. But I was surprised by how much of the conversations Stella has with these characters was dedicated to resource requests. It was quite high, I'd say at least half, for every character. And to be clear there aren't that many conversations with each character to begin with. The result is that pretty much every character feels underdeveloped. Its not that what's there isn't good, its just that its not as fleshed out as I'd like it to be. Pretty much every character's story is formulaic. There are some attempts to shake things up, one moment in particular was quite memorable, but during my time playing the sameness creeped in. I ended up feelings annoyed launching the game and seeing my 50% progress bar, knowing that I still had half the game left, with more repetitive stories and minigames.

Spiritfarer's ending is emblematic of the whole game. It beautiful visuals and music, but narratively it is lacking. The focus is put on Stella, and this on its own is a good idea. We see Stella deal with all of her passengers, but at the end her focus turns inwards, as there's no one else left to focus on. However we don't actually see how Stella deals with her passengers, because Stella is a silent protagonist. Despite having a named character with a predefined backstory, Stella herself cannot speak. Having silent protagonists works well for many games, but for Spiritfarer it greatly holds the story back. It robs moments, like the ending, of their narrative weight. Spiritfarer does something I absolutely adore, despite having no lyrics in any of the songs during the game, it has vocals in the credits. I adore this trope, but Spiritfarer managed to make it land flat, because the ending is all about Stella, and I don't know nearly enough about her to care.

Spiritfarer, I wish you were better. I want Stella to have dialogue, and I want more fleshed out stories for all of her passengers. I want the management simulation gameplay to either be made more engaging, or scaled back so it distracts far less from the better half of the game. I want the minigames to be either be made more interesting, or removed. The art and music can stay though, they're beautiful. I wanted to like Spiritfarer, I really did. There even could be a world where I really attached to one of the character's stories, and was able to ignore the game's flaws because of it. That didn't happen, so I'm just left feeling disenchanted.