A lovely game with lovely characters that's unfortunately a massive drag to play. Spiritfarer is a grindy busywork simulator masquerading as a town-building sim or platformer. In reality it's a clicker game where, unlike other click games, you have to spend enormous amounts of time traveling between the things you click on. There's no challenge to any of it, just tedium and a continual test of patience.

I stuck with it for >5 hours expecting it to get better as I unlocked more features. Instead it only got worse as I uncovered more of the world and was forced to spend more and more time on mindless errands which in turn only unlock more mindless errands. The game occasionally rewards you with cute bits of character dialogue, but those are a few and far between compared to the amount of time you'll spend operating click-to-complete chore machines and engaging with possibly the most annoying fishing minigame I've ever encountered.

I've heard there's a beautiful ending, and it saddens me to say I won't stick around to see it. When I saw the average time to main story completion on How Long to Beat was 24 hours, I nearly died.