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Spiritfarer is in that category of games specifically designed to make you cry. While it is often successful at creating those situations, the gameplay portions quickly pile up to become chores, rather than cathartic or relaxing. Then it pulls an Ethan Carter. Spoiler below.
So much good design can be found in Spiritfarer. The characters are all wonderfully drawn and animated, the locations you visit are beautiful, and the stories being told are usually a poignant look into someone’s golden years. Perhaps I should back up.
In Spiritfarer, you are dead.* Charon, the ferryman of the deceased, has decided to retire and leave to you the task of taking the dying to the Everdoor. As a newly initiated psychopomp, you slowly upgrade your ferry while traveling the underworld and finding numerous spirits to take to their final rest.
There are two principal issues with Spiritfarer, I think. First are the game mechanics which tie together the experience. To be quite honest, I think there are just too many. There’s fishing, planting, singing, cooking, mining, smelting, shearing, spinning, crushing, and more. That doesn’t even include the enormous list of map-based minigames, nor the numerous times you’ll need to bounce across the map to get the correct resources or fill a fetch quest (which also involves a song and dance to fast travel if you don’t want the journey to take multiple days). I suppose my complaint is less that there are so many side activities as it is that you’re asked to juggle them all at once, and there simply aren’t enough hours in the in-game days. It becomes less an effort to keep your passengers happy than it does an exercise in most efficiently organizing your activities before nightfall – which runs counter to the “relaxing” atmosphere the game is trying to cultivate.
The second issue stems from the plot twists it has at the end of the game. And here’s where I’ll come back to the asterisk (and massive spoilers). *You’re not actually dead, you’re dying of an unspecified disease and recalling your life as a nurse and the times you watched your friends and family grow old and die. This twist is well-foreshadowed, but I didn’t want to believe it. Because much like Ethan Carter, it turns out everything you’ve been doing the entire game doesn’t really matter. Much like Ethan Carter, the suggestion of what might be is far more interesting than what is. I would have preferred the narrative that we were indeed taking over for Charon: our time in life preparing us for how we spend our time in limbo. You can’t even make the argument that what is happening in the game really happened, since it seems unlikely Charon would leave us to take care of a dozen people and then end the whole psychopomp business.
If I had played but two or three hours of Spiritfarer, it would be solidly in Tier One. Having reached the end, however, I can only barely place it in Tier Two. Without its fantastic music, characters, animation, and locations it would be lower. It is a testament to those qualities that keeps it from falling lower.