It's really hard to gauge how much quality has to do with recognition.
Jotun, Thunder Lotus' first release, was, in my humble, a disaster. Back when I played it I tried to make every gaming purchase, even a risky one, count, extracting as much enjoyment from them as possible. But Jotun showed me such horrible design decisions every step of the way that several levels in I dropped it without regret. Sundered, their next game, got mixed reception upon release, so I ignored it.
Now here's Spiritfarer, getting nominated for stuff and praised by reviewers I like. It's also comfort food tailor made for me specifically: hand-drawn graphics, what attracted me to this team in the first place, platforming, Persona-esque daily grind with character study to boot and that sweet theme of death I fell in love with since Valkyrie Profile. Maritime setting! Metroidvania elements! Co-op! Let's go already!
The lackluster action of the studio's previous titles gets rolled back here in favor of a chill, beginner friendly experience without hard and explicit fail states. As the player tends to spirits they fare into afterlife, they go back and forth between simple minigames on their ship and exploration of islands. The results of both are parts of a feedback loop: gathering stuff, some of it in service of the spirits' earthly and questly needs, some to build structures to gather even more stuff with. This process is marred by a sense of severe linearity, as by the first 5th of the game all the available types of resources have revealed themselves to the player and since then progress only in value, without variation in source or usage. Each tier of value becomes available more or less precisely as the next section of the world map opens up.
Only the spirits are a saving grace, they earn this game all of its stars. They often shake the player out of repetition by where they come from or what they require, which puts emphasis on the aspects of gameplay one may take for granted. Alice the Hedgehog for example may ask for a relocation of her house, which in this game means rearranging the whole ship since every building is shaped like a crude tetromino. Beverly the Smolbird is small, often lost in the visual detail and thus may end up left to starve unattended.
Out of all the cute and charming characters, the one I ended up having the biggest emotional response to was Jackie, from the Farewell update. I hate him, he's such a piece of garbage that every line out of his mouth made me cuss. And he knows it! And the game knows as well. The game's writing in general left me cold, it has a very 2020 internet quality to it, if that makes any sense. But with that guy it transcended, hit something special, at least for me. This emptiness I haven't felt since teenagerhood, one that comes from the realization that some people are shit and neither you, nor they can really do anything about it.
Unfortunately, all of that beautiful hate and emptiness is built on a very wobbly foundation. The ship that the player travels on is a visual metaphor for the whole game - a lot of structures and systems struggling to
exist on top of the Unity engine instead of naturally extending it. It's true on both technical and gamedesign fronts. In the former case, it means various in-game events contradicting each other: taking
interactability away from important objects, de- and respawning player characters when things get too crazy and sometimes just freezing the characters in place. In terms of gamedesign, there are glaring, basic
mistakes, like character visibility - it's possible to lose one's position on the screen, easy to get obscured by some foreground elements. And with how lightweight the characters are, one is likely to then misposition
themselves, making the game's rudimentary platforming more cumbersome than cathartic. All of this is made twice as bad with co-op, where the camera is incapable of following the players' speeds, often leaving one or
both off screen. With the second player controlling Daffodil the Cat, a character two times shorter than the main girl Stella, they will have the worst time exploring interiors of numerous buildings scattered throughout
the game, as the facades will keep them obscured basically at all times.
I take no joy in this criticism. While I do cherish the heights the new chillout approach let the team reach with this game, those are but a fraction of dozens of hours this game requires to complete. For people like myself, who enjoy the fantasy of being effective and productive every day, the menial labor of this game's grind is fine, it's kind of a part of that fantasy to be honest. But to anybody without these predispositions reaching "the good parts" will most likely not be worth it. One thing I wish Thunder Lotus does with a next project is stick to a simpler, more immediate gameplay concept and polish up some fundamentals.
Here's to a better next one.
Jotun, Thunder Lotus' first release, was, in my humble, a disaster. Back when I played it I tried to make every gaming purchase, even a risky one, count, extracting as much enjoyment from them as possible. But Jotun showed me such horrible design decisions every step of the way that several levels in I dropped it without regret. Sundered, their next game, got mixed reception upon release, so I ignored it.
Now here's Spiritfarer, getting nominated for stuff and praised by reviewers I like. It's also comfort food tailor made for me specifically: hand-drawn graphics, what attracted me to this team in the first place, platforming, Persona-esque daily grind with character study to boot and that sweet theme of death I fell in love with since Valkyrie Profile. Maritime setting! Metroidvania elements! Co-op! Let's go already!
The lackluster action of the studio's previous titles gets rolled back here in favor of a chill, beginner friendly experience without hard and explicit fail states. As the player tends to spirits they fare into afterlife, they go back and forth between simple minigames on their ship and exploration of islands. The results of both are parts of a feedback loop: gathering stuff, some of it in service of the spirits' earthly and questly needs, some to build structures to gather even more stuff with. This process is marred by a sense of severe linearity, as by the first 5th of the game all the available types of resources have revealed themselves to the player and since then progress only in value, without variation in source or usage. Each tier of value becomes available more or less precisely as the next section of the world map opens up.
Only the spirits are a saving grace, they earn this game all of its stars. They often shake the player out of repetition by where they come from or what they require, which puts emphasis on the aspects of gameplay one may take for granted. Alice the Hedgehog for example may ask for a relocation of her house, which in this game means rearranging the whole ship since every building is shaped like a crude tetromino. Beverly the Smolbird is small, often lost in the visual detail and thus may end up left to starve unattended.
Out of all the cute and charming characters, the one I ended up having the biggest emotional response to was Jackie, from the Farewell update. I hate him, he's such a piece of garbage that every line out of his mouth made me cuss. And he knows it! And the game knows as well. The game's writing in general left me cold, it has a very 2020 internet quality to it, if that makes any sense. But with that guy it transcended, hit something special, at least for me. This emptiness I haven't felt since teenagerhood, one that comes from the realization that some people are shit and neither you, nor they can really do anything about it.
Unfortunately, all of that beautiful hate and emptiness is built on a very wobbly foundation. The ship that the player travels on is a visual metaphor for the whole game - a lot of structures and systems struggling to
exist on top of the Unity engine instead of naturally extending it. It's true on both technical and gamedesign fronts. In the former case, it means various in-game events contradicting each other: taking
interactability away from important objects, de- and respawning player characters when things get too crazy and sometimes just freezing the characters in place. In terms of gamedesign, there are glaring, basic
mistakes, like character visibility - it's possible to lose one's position on the screen, easy to get obscured by some foreground elements. And with how lightweight the characters are, one is likely to then misposition
themselves, making the game's rudimentary platforming more cumbersome than cathartic. All of this is made twice as bad with co-op, where the camera is incapable of following the players' speeds, often leaving one or
both off screen. With the second player controlling Daffodil the Cat, a character two times shorter than the main girl Stella, they will have the worst time exploring interiors of numerous buildings scattered throughout
the game, as the facades will keep them obscured basically at all times.
I take no joy in this criticism. While I do cherish the heights the new chillout approach let the team reach with this game, those are but a fraction of dozens of hours this game requires to complete. For people like myself, who enjoy the fantasy of being effective and productive every day, the menial labor of this game's grind is fine, it's kind of a part of that fantasy to be honest. But to anybody without these predispositions reaching "the good parts" will most likely not be worth it. One thing I wish Thunder Lotus does with a next project is stick to a simpler, more immediate gameplay concept and polish up some fundamentals.
Here's to a better next one.