izigame.me

Spiritfarer is a charming and unique mix of exploration and character management that tackles a very ambitious topic, and for all the charm it has, it falls short by failing to provide any meaningful gameplay and is stretched far too thin for what it provides as a narrative.
Technical Issues and Performance
Spiritfarer overall ran well. I haven’t encountered any crashes, though I have encountered a few minor issues, such as very specific events briefly stuttering upon starting or the Gamepad control scheme being slightly off—like a total lack of Deadzone on the analog stick, which I haven’t encountered in any other games. While no quests or events were broken, another occasional issue was NPC animations slightly glitching out, especially when navigating on your late-game ship.
Graphics and Sound
SF looks quite decent. Animations are expressive, and backgrounds are beautifully drawn. Despite the very polished look, animations are also a bit limited per character and repeat a bit too often to not feel just a little repetitive. Noticeably, the game can look a little washed-out whenever it zooms in during certain event sequences.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3172077001
The soundtrack is much the same: good, if not outstanding, and overall fitting to each and every scene and situation.
Story and Setting
Players control Stella, who is the titular new Spiritfarer, tasked with guiding spirits to the Everdoor once they are ready to properly pass on. While Stella has her own personal story to follow, the bulk of Spiritfarer’s narrative lies in the spirits that you are actively helping to pass on. This takes the form of a series of quests each, which have varying levels of depth in terms of writing; what I am also meaning to imply is that there is a bit of a lack in worldbuilding, as most other NPCs you encounter don’t really have anything of value to say and usually flavor dialogue is reduced to whimsical jokes—not too bad, but it feels as if Spiritfarer never really makes full use of the setting that it does have and leaves a lot of it a little too ambiguous for my own liking.
That being the case, the spirit's stories are overall decent, and the game isn’t afraid to tackle some more uncomfortable character traits throughout, such as characters with dementia, characters who are flawed in their actions towards other people, dealing with trauma, and so on and so forth. Here, my biggest critique lies in the fact that I would’ve liked to have fewer spirits overall but more writing for the stronger characters. As it stands, the only time you can enjoy the ongoing story is between solving their various quests, which inevitably leads to, at times, multiple hours of no progress whatsoever, which hamstrings stronger moments leading up to their eventual passing at the Everdoor.
All of that leads to the biggest issue with Spiritfarer: It is simply stretched too thin and makes too little use of the world it is trying to present to truly grip you. And a large part of these pacing issues lies within the lacking gameplay loop.
Gameplay
Fundamentally, Spiritfarer is a management game. You get a ship with various facilities to build out to better care for the spirits you are progressing through. Furthermore, this is all staggered across a sizeable ocean map that is limited by various environmental hazards you need to upgrade your ship to be able to progress through. For example, the first major block is a glacier, for which you need to progress your ship to an icebreaker.
However. Once that jump happens, the cycle merely repeats 1:1. Every crafting facility just goes one step higher. Linen goes to wool, then to silk. Copper goes to iron, and so on; while there is an illusion of progression, your actual gameplay hardly evolves at all from area to area.
This goes hand in hand with another issue: Spiritfarer is profoundly monotonous throughout most of its runtime. Crafting is not automated and tied to something hardly worth calling minigames; rather, they are minor tasks to mimic the crafting. That, in itself, is commendable, but given there is absolutely nothing to do in the game except for crafting and resource gathering to progress the different spirit quests, it leads to the player jumping from one unskippable, gruelingly slow crafting station to the next, whose tasks are so completely boring that I wish they’d be automated instead. Take the crusher; it’s mashing E. The Smelter: press E at each fan until it finishes. Run into falling meteors, run into flying jellyfish, and run into lightning. It's all the same. And it’s all tied to, yes, detailed and charming, but nonetheless, over the course of 20+ hours, also extremely slow character animations.
The best comparison I can think of is imagining a game like Harvest Moon, but instead of merely watering your crops once a day, you have to do it every few minutes. And each crop field has a different button assigned to it. On its own, it would not be an issue if it wasn’t so utterly monotonous when put next to every other activity.
Another issue with the pacing is that certain quests in the game are time-gated. For example, many of the aforementioned ship upgrades that are needed to get higher-level materials require Spirit Flowers, a special resource spawned after one of your spirits passes the Everdoor. Hilariously enough, this has led to a situation a few times during my playthrough where I have just been waiting and wishing for the next quest to just pop up so the NPC I am supposed to be so heavily emotionally invested in can finally ask me to guide them to their deaths.
It took me just over twenty hours to see the end of the game, but each and every single hour was spent doing fundamentally the exact same tasks over and over and over again, with the mere reward being a crumb of writing per character. 
Ocean exploration is similarly a wasted opportunity, as there is next to no reward for exploration. This is partially due to the game not requiring the optional unlockable abilities to progress the story, nor does it require any optional blueprints. Crafting recipes that are required for quests are immediately gifted to the player. Thus, this entire vector of player progression is just completely pointless unless the player wants to shoot for 100% completion. This leaves the ocean entirely dry, except for exactly two types of locations. A) resource farms: either map events that are comparable to the aforementioned crafting minigames or truly just that: an island with respawning resource nodes; and B) city hubs that center around spirit quests and buying largely worthless items.
Something that can be fairly fun early on is ship management, in which you are slowly building up what feels like a miniature city. But sadly, this aspect too feels undercooked. While it nicely supports visual progression, there is no incentive to care about how your ship is aligned. There is no customization in its looks, and in the end, it just boils down to being able to fit whatever buildings you need into the current size of your vessel and being able to decently navigate it during events. While I cared to align everything nicely for the first few hours, eventually it just evolved into housing gore.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3172567096
Final Thoughts
I can see the appeal Spiritfarer has for people, but in the end, the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze. While it is commendable to tackle topics surrounding death fairly competently, the atrocious pacing runs the danger of reducing its narrative to mere melodrama. It is simply too stretched thin for the truly unique content that it could offer had the game been a bit more focused.