The houses of the departed characters stand empty, and eventually you’ve upgraded everything that it’s possible to upgrade. Beyond that, this massive ship/village you’ve built up with homes and industry, starts to become less and less important. Your favorite characters have already said goodbye, and you’re stuck playing out the motions with the dregs. Unfortunately, by the time it is possible to recruit Elena, the game is mostly done. I always make it a point to recruit her as soon as possible and rush through her questline quickly to concentrate on the more likeable passengers. Then there’s Elena… a ridiculously unpleasant character that serves to give the end game some extra challenges but who won’t even let you hug her until the very end. Stella’s sister Lily was added a few months back, but she mostly exists to explain aspects of the plot that players used to have to get through a $10 art book that was separately purchased. While moving, she’s not noticeably different than the much better-done story of Alice earlier in the game. The latest update adds Beverly, an adorable old lady in owl form who slowly succumbs to dementia. The first six passengers you take on are far better than the ones who join toward the end. The reason I call the game slightly broken is because it can’t maintain this pace. Sometimes you have as many as five passengers on the ship, and the endless hails from them to tell you a story about their lives or complain about being hungry is almost as nerve wracking as a firefight in a first-person shooter. The game clock ticks on constantly, and passengers need to be roused out of bed at a certain time and get angry if they aren’t fed in a timely manner or hugged. That’s not even counting when you actually arrive at destinations to do exploring and platforming challenges or heading back to the shipyard to expand your vessel because you’ve run out of room for new necessary facilities. There’s hardly a moment in the early game when you can stop to breathe because you’re constantly moving across the ship to take a pie out of the oven then water the crops. They need to eat, so you construct and update your kitchen as well as growing food or fishing. These materials need to be refined, so you build and improve looms and sawmills and smelters. Passengers need houses, so you gather building materials. When you first start the game, it’s surprisingly frantic. Each one of the characters is meticulously animated and well-written, with developed personalities and internal struggles that Stella helps them overcome until they are ready to pass in a dramatic scene that makes me cry every time I see it. There’s Gwen, her poor little rich girl best friend with an acidic wit who previously attempted suicide, Atul, Stella’s extrovert uncle who is secretly dying inside after watching his friends and family fade from his life, the dedicated unionizer and anti-fascist Astrid and her lothario husband Giovanni, and more. The strength of the game comes in part from its gorgeous but simple art style that is vaguely reminiscent of Wind Waker as well as the connections that Stella builds with her passengers. This involves building them house, feeding them, running errands for them, hugging them, and finally letting them go when they’re ready. Accompanied by your cat, Daffodil, the goal is to find the spirits across the map and get them onto your boat. You play as Stella, a young woman who has entered the afterlife and has been recruited by Charon to ferry souls from limbo to the other side. The game is mostly a life simulation in the vein of Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, but with some very interesting twists. Despite that, the title kind of remains slightly broken, but in a weird way it enhances the overarching themes of death and palliative care that are the crux of the experience. Spiritfarer was released in 2020, but the updates that have continued to drop mean that just now in 2021 do I really feel the game is finished. Screencap from Spiritfarer Warning: Spoilers for Spiritfarer.
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