Spiritfarer: Farewell Edition Review (Elfen)
Spiritfairer is a deeply evocative game about death positivity, being a comfort to others and facing yourself, the one universal human experience. Now death positivity isn’t a new subject for me, I’ve only recently played P3P and Outerwilds both amazing games in their own right, and several older titles like morticians tales.
Spiritfairer’s main emotional unique aspect is in both its unflinching willingness to talk about ugly deaths, and its unwillingness to be unkind about it. Your job as the fairer, as a carer in life, is to comfort those going on to vanish into… no one knows. No one will know. And many times its a way to reconnect, to spend time with your uncle. To get one more lesson from the old hippie gardener.
Yet often, death isn’t kind. It’s not a happy reunion. It’s watching someone cling onto life so long they can only express confusion and anger at you, before losing enough awareness to even consent to go beyond the everdoor. Sometimes it's a child. So young that there is nothing, absolutely nothing you could say to make it better. Because it isn’t fair. Its painful and cruel, and thousands of kids still go through it. Sometimes it's sudden any you don’t get a goodbye. Sometimes… you just give up. You don’t learn a lesson. You just… you're tired.
Death isn’t kind or unkind. It’s just inevitable. Confident and feeling like we've put our business aside, or so tired we can't stand another minute. Doesn’t matter. It will come. And that's why we have to be kind to each other. Always. Even when it's not deserved.
That theme is communicated so well, often even in ways that run up against it as a game. Mechanically while its a management game like stardew for example. I found it much more exhausting, always fretting about having enough resources to feed everyone, get them housing. Manage their relationships and so on.
And once you finally get management under your thumb, it's usually so long in the game there's just not that many people left. All the food you could want and no one to give it to. Your ship/village much like our relationships eventually fill up with mostly empty homes, ghosts of the people who have come in and out of our lives. With each guest that leaves the ship grows a little more tedious to manage and more lonely to actually live in.
This all makes it much less fun to play but all evoke what life can feel like. What death does to us. We've all lost someone and forever had a part of our heart reserved for them just left empty, and the more time we spend in this world, the more beautiful people we let into it, the more empty space they will leave.
As a result it's weirdly one of the management games I’ve least enjoyed actually playing, but most enjoyed narratively and thematically. And any suggestion I could offer to make the game more fun to actually go through risks hurting the them.
Aside from gameplay, the game is stunning. It reminded me a lot of child of light in its smooth visuals, or banner saga in the way it uses characters who look and feel like hand animated cartoons. The music, while not exactly the type I would just listen to in a vacuum, is extremely good within the game at setting a mood and evoking a vibe.