Spiritfarer

A mostly pleasant, but also tedious and broken, side-scrolling errand simulator that asks of you ever so often, with a remarkably delicate yet powerful narrative voice, to accept the inevitable and tender embrace of death. Worth playing but also flawed.

The story, characters, drawings, and animation are all superb. Several times it brought me to tears. The gameplay loop, which at first seemed to me to be an odd fit, ends up working very well with the thrust of the narrative. It's all about farming, mining, crafting, cooking, buying, selling, and exploring new places to enable more variations of that basic loop. The mundane nature of this grind is a matter-of-fact reminder of the everyday labor required to maintain loving relationships with others, and to encourage patience with their demands of us. It's not easy to give. And yet the protagonist is always smiling, never tired, and there are hugs and cute cats and endless cheer.

Unfortunately, despite the heaps of praise this game gets and mostly deserves, it has some serious problems. Around the game's mid-point it changes from charming to annoying. And what mid-point means exactly is hard to say. The game might tell you that you are 50% through, but though it's an open world and you can complete quests in any order, some playthroughs are definitely less optimal than others. Depending on your choices you might get the end-game quest long before you reach 100%.

In any case, the more you play the bigger the demands, and those require endless repetition and backtracking. And the more difficult quests are often the least rewarding. For example, in the late game there is a quest requiring you to collect a large amount of rare items. It took me forever, and when I finally handed in the items I got ... nothing. No additional story content. No special ability. Just the empty satisfaction of having an "achievement".

The tedium is made frustrating by some poor user experience designs. First, The game map is awful, showing no annotations and requiring you to scroll over every individual location just to see its name. Just finding where you want to go is painful, and then traveling there is extremely slow. After the tenth time you're asked to go to the same place it gets very old indeed.

Equally awful is the cooking recipe menu. The tiny little icons have no logical organization and you have to scroll through dozens of them to find what you want. The ingredient combinations are sometimes unintuitive.

But worse is how story events are triggered in the game. It's simply a mystery to me. Often it's just that time needs to pass, but the only way to pass time is to grind through the loop. You can sleep, but you can only do it at night and that covers a small portion of the day. A meditation mechanic is introduced at some point but it does not work. I'm embarrassed to say that a few times I ended up leaving my computer on just so time would pass. Oh, and alt-tabbing out of the game forces it to pause, just in case you wanted to "cheat". Also, some events depend on completing entirely unrelated tasks. For example, one character will appear only if you do a very specific thing after you've already completed the quest lines of a certain number of characters. I did not do this thing, because there was no way to know that I should have, and got stuck.

So, I very strongly recommend that if you are aimlessly waiting for a story event that you look at online guides to find a new quest. Yes, that breaks the immersion and will surely spoil some of the story, but unfortunately it's just far too easy to miss quest triggers. Also, online guides can help you work around the frustrating user interfaces for the map and recipes.

In conclusion, this game can be enjoyed but only with heaps of patience and external assistance. So, it's definitely not for everybody.

Some specific tips with mild spoilers: