![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Spiritfarer
I played Spiritfarer! It was...an experience! I think some of this is down to the fact that I was very convinced I would love this game despite, I now understand, knowing basically nothing about how the gameplay worked. However, a lot of this is down to a lot of design and polish issues, which I probably would have been willing to set aside if I hadn't already been annoyed, and some pacing issues, which I suspect were largely caused by post-release updates that added extra content to the game.
So basically, under the cut, I will be saying a lot of negative things about a game that I know many people loved and that I also expected to love! I don't think it's a bad game in the sense that I don't understand why people liked it, I just think it's badly made in a million little ways that I ultimately just couldn't forgive, potentially because the core gameplay is just not my kind of thing.
Spoilers for all of it! Even if you have played Spiritfarer before: Spoilers for new content that came out over the course of 2021, some of which significantly impacts the ending! Spoilers for not-in-the-game content where the creators have explained the events of the game in an extremely literal manner!
This game. Ohhhhhh this game. I think the very foundation of all my issues is this: I never bought Animal Crossing when everyone and their mother was playing it because I simply did not think I would find it interesting. I am just not huge on crafting as a game's Vibe! I am very into crafting if it's like, poisoned by capitalism, because then I feel like I can win at it by incessantly scaling up even though I am actually just dooming myself to a pointless cycle and allowing myself to be blinded to that face by the dopamine hit of watching numbers go up. I also don't mind management sims when there are a lot of moving parts to keep track of and while you're fixing A, B is catching fire, because my brain loves that shit!
I just don't ever give a shit about the cooking part of games, and this is very much a game for people who enjoy the cooking part of games.
So that's what underlies all the other issues! I could have overcome that on its own, but this game is just so full of inconveniences (some of them unintentional technical issues, some of them so much a part of the game that it honestly feels like they made it miserably tedious on purpose) that I ended up constantly fighting back my own annoyance. I'm an impatient person! I probably shouldn't have played this in the first place! This is not the first time THIS YEAR that I have started playing a game I thought I would love because I knew a lot of other people liked it and been shocked to realize that I apparently only listened to plot descriptions while every word about the game's genre went in one ear and out the other! I don't know why I'm like this!
This is going to be unstructured as hell so for now let me just exorcise some of that annoyance by firing off grievances at random:
1. LACK OF POLISH: Things in this game cut each other off all the time in a way that constantly threw me off balance. I'd be having an important plot conversation with a spirit and then all of a sudden the screen would cut to the "DISCOVERED A NEW ISLAND" graphic. I'd be making logs and trying to focus on the little dots I'm supposed to hit and then suddenly the game zooms way the fuck out to show me that the boat hit a crate. I start talking to a flying spirit and they try to land in front of me but I was standing at the edge of a building so they just fall down the gap and I have no idea if I've missed the opportunity to get that scripted conversation or not.
2. AGGRESSIVELY TEDIOUS: The loom was fucking great. Then the sawmill came along and I fucking hated it but you know what, I got the hang of it. We made it work. Then the foundry! I also eventually got the hang of that but it never stopped being terrible having to take a fucking eternity to make a copper ingot or whatever! Except you know what? Then the smithy came along and recontextualized what I thought of when I thought "eternity" and the foundry became comparatively easy to bear. ME IN THE SMITHY HITTING THIS LITTLE YELLOW BLOB OVER AND OVER AGAIN, 50+ TIMES, YES I WAS COUNTING, KNOWING I HAVE TO DO THIS SEVERAL MORE TIMES? And then....the windmill. WHAT FUCKING SADIST MADE THE WINDMILL? WHY DOES IT TAKE FOUR HUNDRED FUCKING YEARS TO MAKE ONE THING OF FLOUR? WHY DOES NO ONE EVER EXPLAIN TO STELLA HOW IT WORKS SO I HAD TO LOOK IT UP BC THE SILHOUETTE OF THE BLADE OF THE WINDMILL WAS IN FRONT OF THE ALREADY INSCRUTABLE MECHANISM? WHY DO I HAVE TO CONSTANTLY RETURN TO THE WINDMILL TO READJUST THE THING SO THE WINDMILL WILL START SPINNING AGAIN, ONLY TO STOP PENDING READJUSTMENT AFTER THIRTY SECOND HAVE ELAPSED? WHY IS THE UPGRADE FOR THE WINDMILL, WHICH MAKES IT PRODUCE TWO BAGS OF FLOUR FOR EACH CENTURIES-LONG ORDEAL AND IS THEREFORE THE SINGLE BIGGEST EFFICIENCY GAIN IN THE ENTIRE GAME, THE REWARD FOR A SIDEQUEST ON THE STARTING ISLAND, A LOCATION WITH NO RESOURCES AND NO PLOT RELEVANCE THAT I DID NOT REVISIT UNTIL, THIRTY HOURS INTO THE GAME, I GOOGLED "SPIRITFARER WINDMILL UPGRADE." WHO DID THIS. WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS ACCEPTABLE. WHY IS IT LIKE THIS??????? (The crusher rules and everything else should have followed its example.)
3. It's also frustrating as hell to have all these production facilities that require prompt and precise reaction to whatever animation they're showing you...in a game that's designed so that people passing by outside the building obscure that animation.
4. As the game progressed my elaborate floating city got bigger and bigger and my passengers got smaller and smaller. Really could have used a Marauder's Map or something because tracking down Buck in particular was always a fucking nightmare.
5. I was constantly trying to track down Buck even when he wasn't throwing the little [!] icon to let me know he had something to say, because Buck's mood gauge said if I kept him happy he would harvest XP Potion for me, so I needed to keep finding him to keep him fed and hugged so he would GIVE ME XP POTION, because across all upgrades you need like 45 bottles of the stuff, and the XP Potion minigame is a fucking SCAM in which sometimes I would only be presented with three glowing purple guys and some of those would be back to back so I'd only get two bottles from the whole fucking minigame, and it's like two in-game days before you can repeat it, and it was just! FUCKING EXHAUSTING! So it would be NICE, if keeping Buck fed and happy meant he would in turn SUPPLY ME WITH XP POTION, but he never fucking did because the mood system is a fucking SCAM and they shouldn't even be advertising these fucking production rewards at the happiest end of the scale because AT BEST it's Atul periodically offering me like three planks? ATUL I LOVE YOU AND I APPRECIATE IT BUT YOU WEREN'T EXACTLY MAKING A DENT, YOU KNOW?
6. This game crashed on me something like ten times while I was playing it. I think in the entirety of the time I've had my Switch, during which I've played something like sixty different games, I had experienced one or two crashes total before I started playing Spiritfarer. It crashed CONSTANTLY. And most games these days, which do not crash constantly, have extremely diligent autosave features, so even if they do crash, when you open the game back up again you're only losing the last minute or two of what you played. Spiritfarer crashes constantly AND has a ridiculously weak autosave system. It saves when you go to islands, it saves when you come back from islands, and it saves when you sleep. So if you spend a long stretch of time on your boat - something you would only do if you were, say, crafting a lot, or going deep in your inventory and your blueprint table to get everything upgraded, and the game crashed, you would lose all of that fucking MINUTIAE, because you didn't do anything during that time that would trigger the autosave. Now maybe it's just a confirmation bias thing and it feels like the game always crashed when I was 20-30 minutes into some minutiae just because those are the ones that stand out to me as most inconvenient, but if I talk out my ass it does make SOME KIND OF TECHNICAL SENSE that, when you go a long time without saving, the game's list of Things It Needs To Incorporate Into The Save gets longer and longer, and possibly! Maybe! That could be something that literally CAUSES a crash. I don't know. (And there were I think two instances where the game crashed almost immediately after I slept or left an island so I basically only lost seconds, but its unfailing tendency to crash when I was knee deep in inventory management definitely SEEMS like there has to be some causation there.)
One way to mitigate this, if it's somehow just NOT POSSIBLE to make the game autosave every time Stella enters a crafting station, or every two minutes, or SOMETHING that doesn't completely fuck over players who take the "farm and craft and fish to your heart's content!" premise of this game seriously, would be a manual save! Some games don't even have an autosave and they just TELL the player this and encourage them to manually save on a regular basis! They just have to hit Start and then Save and then Start again and they go on with their game! It's very easy!
Spiritfarer only has Save & Quit which is the wildest fucking thing I have ever seen. WHAT IS THIS, MAJORA'S MASK? Limiting you to Save & Quit (and not including Save & Continue) is a hallmark of games that want you to respect the challenge of how hard they are (the idea being that they're fine with you saving if it's because you're stepping away from the game, but they don't want you saving just because you think something difficult is about to happen and you don't want to lose your progress if you die), which is CLEARLY not the intention here. It is UNHINGED that this game got me in the habit of quitting out to the menu screen and immediately restarting the game just because I was so sick of repeating 20-30 minutes of tedious bullshit that I was willing to play along with this ridiculous save system. THEIR OFFICIAL WEBSITE IS LITERALLY LIKE "YES WE DO CRASH ALL THE TIME ON SWITCH. HAVE YOU TRIED DOING SAVE & QUIT CONSTANTLY?" Like...could nobody advise the dev team on how to fix this? It's been out for a YEAR.
(One time I was fucking furious because as part of A Big Sequence of Inventory Noodling, I realized I needed more quartz or whatever, so I headed over to the nearest turtle to plant what I had, and when I got to the turtle I was like you know what I've been noodling without saving for a WHILE, let me save now before this game crashes and I throw my controller at the screen, but because it's Save & Quit and this game is needlessly aggravating at all times WHEN I LOADED THE GAME BACK UP THE TURTLE WAS GONE BC THE GAME WAS LIKE "WELL U ALREADY VISITED HER" EVEN THOUGH I DIDN'T DO A DAMN THING? Stop punishing me for trying to work with your garbage limitations!!!!)
7. WHY CAN'T I SAIL AT NIGHT? Granted I ended up halfway grateful for this because the only thing that ended up saving me in some of those crashes was that whenever night rolled around and the ship stopped moving, I promptly sent Stella to bed because crafting while the ship wasn't moving felt unbearable inefficient. But EVERY TIME THIS HAPPENS it's a twenty second transition. WHY CAN'T I JUST SAIL AT NIGHT? Or purchase an early upgrade to let me sail at night? I'M REALLY SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THAT THIS ALL POWERFUL ARTIFACT CALLED THE EVERLIGHT THAT I RECEIVED FROM FUCKING CHARON JUST...STOPS WORKING BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAWN? Where was that in the fine print? It works underground in a pitch black mine but at night it stops working until the sun comes back up? It doesn't even have enough juice for me to PULL UP A MAP? WHAT IS THAT? CAN YOU REALLY CALL IT THE EVERLIGHT? I assumed this was a technical limitation of some kind and I was Learning To Accept It but then Lily showed up and it was like GREAT NEWS: NOW THAT THE GAME'S BASICALLY OVER (more on this later), YOU CAN TRAVEL AT NIGHT. I could have been doing this the WHOLE TIME and they just didn't let me for no fucking reason?
8. God this game needs a better menu system. There are way too many categories of items and I could never remember where rare shit like Lightning in a Bottle was supposed to be - I'd just be paging through all ten or twelve item categories never sure if I was overlooking it or if I just didn't have any. The map should have been accessible at all times or at LEAST something that would tell me WHAT ISLAND I WAS ON WHILE I WAS ON IT. Trying to find the right cooked dish when I had dozens of them in inventory was a fucking mess. Having to go to the edit screen and manually select every single building on the boat just to figure out which ones had upgrades available was fucking ridiculous. Literally EVERY SINGLE ASPECT of this game is rough and unpolished in some way that it doesn't need to be.
9. It's really great that they added an option to turn off the music for Alex the bus driving seal. Good for them for realizing people might want to stick around at a bus stop for a while (or might have to if they arrived just as the Everlight's curfew hit) and wouldn't want to listen to that music on a loop indefinitely! Here's my question: Why does the option to turn it off come with NINE lines of dialogue to page through? Granted, you can just hit the button to turn off the music and then cancel out the conversation immediately and the music will still be off. You know what you do have to go all the way through to turn the music back on? The NINETEEN lines of dialogue that accompany the "on" option. NINETEEN! And it's not the first time. It's EVERY time. If you cancel out of the conversation at any point before it ends, the music won't come back.
10. It's very annoying that "I'm hungry" dialogue prioritizes over legit plot/relationship dialogue. Yeah, Gwen, of course you're hungry, all I have is fruit and you won't eat it. I was really prioritizing keeping everyone fed and happy in the first few hours I played this before I realized it was making me hate the game, so I stopped, and it was just very annoying to have to skip through "I'm starving" dialogue and then interact AGAIN to see if characters had anything interesting to say. Am I a monster? Maybe.
11. It's weird how strongly some things are telegraphed (I got the little "hold A for as long as you can! No, not that long" message every time I accidentally fucked up a swing while mining, even 20+ hours in), when plenty of things just aren't at all - nothing indicates that it's possible to get progressively higher and higher bounces, and it's one thing for bonus chests to be inaccessible without that knowledge but so is one that's required to be able to move Beverly's story along. Also the first time I ended up in Owl Spirit Limbo I had no idea I had to interact with the butterflies to get them to move platforms around so I could progress (would this have been clearer in the old version of the game, when they were just a ball of light? I DON'T KNOW BUT PROBABLY). I thought I was just somehow failing at navigating the platforms and I had to check a walkthrough to find out I was just supposed to hit A by the butterflies. I also had no idea I needed to plant Mysterious Seed until I got to a point where I couldn't advance in the game without Bottled Ectoplasm and googled where I was supposed to be finding it. The item description for Mysterious Seed is very "this thing is moving and weird and I should plant it ASAP" but you don't see the description when you get the seed - you just catch it fishing, and up to that point the only things you catch fishing are 1) fish, 2) trash, and 3) items with no use beyond their monetary value. I was not in the habit of being like "oh, I just caught an item I haven't seen before, let me page through all nine million sections of inventory and find it so I can read its description" but maybe that's on me!
12. The cat is extremely cute. Cutting down trees with the cat using our shared Everlight saw (WHICH WORKS 24 HOURS A DAY I CAN'T HELP BUT NOTICE) is extremely cute and on the level of tedious repetition I can handle. When you get to the final area, with all the mist and the pine trees, the cat cannot navigate the platforms for SHIT which means every fucking time I want to cut down a tree, I have to hit A, watch Stella stand there and wait for the cat for like ten seconds, and then eventually there is an animation where the cat inflates like a balloon to beeline its way to your side. It's very cute! But it is coming after what was already an unreasonably long delay! BE BETTER AT DESIGNING AROUND THESE THINGS, PLEASE.
"END" OF LIST, mainly because that is everything I can think of right now in terms of minor-or-maybe-not quality of life issues, because I did not catalogue my minor gameplay grievances as I went because I WAS TRYING TO ENJOY MYSELF. But there were just constantly a million little things like those working against me! I HAD TO TRY VERY HARD!
Now, as for story and the overall structure of the game. To be perfectly honest, I didn't really get super invested in most of the characters, so emotionally the game didn't especially hit. Because so many of them knew Stella when she was alive, it felt more like I was trying to piece together their existing relationship with Stella than it felt like Sarah-as-Stella was forming a relationship with them, and it feels like a huge missed opportunity to me that they don't build relationships with each other (everyone gathering at the stern of the boat to see departing spirits off to the Everdoor always hit for me and I wish there had been more to it beyond just the ritual). Weirdly it was the shittiest spirits I felt some of the strongest bonds with - Giovanni and Bruce&Mickey. Even though most of the spirits had nicknames for me, Giovanni calling me PEANUT always hit???? I was so disappointed in him when I realized he was gleefully cheating on Astrid???? I CRIED WHEN HE WENT THROUGH THE DOOR. Anyway I guess it makes sense that if a lot of the relationships didn't work for me because I felt like I was supposed to take the existing Stella connection as my own, the ones that DID work most for me were the ones where I-as-Stella actually had to work to forge a connection.
An exception is Atul, who was, yes, Stella's uncle, but was affectionate enough with Stella that it worked - like, that's how any decent uncle relationship starts, with you as a kid just being like I don't really care that you're my dad's brother but you're very nice to me and it's fun to have you around! And for whatever reason Atul was VERY good at staying in a very good mood with relatively little input from me, and he's just around for so long in the game that he became a fixture to me - Atul exclaiming over berries on an island and then bringing me some, Atul in his workshop making me planks, Atul playing his music, Atul doing repairs - and it was clear enough from how his requests were different from, say, Gwen's and Summer's, that the game was structured so that he would be around for a long time and wouldn't be one of my first to go. (This was extended by me not realizing that Fat was not an ingredient I had to find in a store but rather a category of ingredients, some of which I could just make on my own - I probably could have made him his fried chicken much earlier than I did.)
I thought it was beautiful that his story involved organizing a big dinner for us and some of the other spirits, and it's one of the things in the game that fits best with how I think I imagined Spiritfarer - I felt like I understood how I was creating something that was meaningful to him, that echoed the kind of thing he loved to do in life, and that would help him to feel like he could move on. A lot of the other spirits' quests just felt like humoring them until they decided on their own that it was time to go, but Atul's felt like I was actively shepherding him towards that, and I was really meta-looking-forward to taking him through the Everdoor. I didn't want him to go, but that's what I was looking forward to, the experience of knowing that it was someone's time to go even though it broke my heart to take them. And I was really looking forward to seeing what he would have to say on the way to the door!
So of course he just vanishes with no warning, no fanfare, and no one having any kind of reaction to it.
This will seem like a huge immediate subject change but bear with me - Spiritfarer has an art book that the devs put out, with concept art and explanations from the devs about design choices and story choices. And while Spiritfarer the game, as it was originally released a year ago, is a fantastical story, both the art book and the updates that were made to the game this year turn it into an extremely literal one: The reason Stella knows so many of these spirits is because actually, she knows all of them, she is in a coma she won't ever wake up from and the entire game is a dream, where as she approaches death her mind casts back to all these people she has known who died. She was a nurse who provided end of life care, and many of these people were her patients or their loved ones. Alice was the first patient she had who passed away. Stanley was a child who was a patient of hers. Mickey doesn't talk because she only ever knew him as a coma patient; it was his brother Bruce who she saw around all the time as he stayed by Mickey's side. Atul disappears because in "real life," Stella's uncle disappeared and she never knew what happened to him.
I...hate this? I hate this so much. I hate that within the reality of the game, none of this actually fucking happened. I hate that all of these spirits were just the imaginings of Stella's dying mind. I hate that everything was just a rehash of what she "really" went through. I hate that the experience I thought I was having isn't true. I hate that they did the whole thing by just releasing extremely detailed and literal explanations after the fact instead of, if that's the story they wanted to tell, making it the story they told.
I hate how this undercuts Bruce and Mickey's trip through the Everdoor, which NEARLY MADE ME CRY. It fucking HIT for me when they're going through the door and Bruce admits that Mickey's been gone for a while, it's just taken him some time to accept that Bruce needs to go as well. That was really fucking interesting to me! But actually it means Mickey was in a fucking coma and Bruce needed to accept that he was gone. THIS GAME LOVES A GOOD COMA.
Most of all, I hate how this plays out with Atul. Why does Atul disappear and leave a spirit flower without being taken to the Everdoor? Because in "real life," Stella's uncle Atul disappeared with no warning and she never knew what happened to him. Okay, but...why. This is a CHOICE. This is what they decided to do with this story! They decided to structure Atul's quest so that you can't possibly complete it until the last third of the game. They decided to keep him around longer than almost any other spirit, so that he would feel like a fixture in a way no one else does. And if they wanted his story to be one about how you don't always get an explanation and you don't always get to say goodbye, fine! But it is fucking WILD to me that the game's way of doing this is just "he's gone, that's it, no comment, no one cares, we will not be addressing this again." It's not real life, it's a constructed narrative, with a heavy emphasis on CONSTRUCTED. Most games have constructed narratives but in this case the structure is always extremely apparent because it takes the form of your quest to-do list - the game uses this to tell you what the story is, and what's coming next, and who's Going Through Something, and where your emotional focus should be. Things don't happen if they don't happen in that Captain's Log screen, and as soon as Atul's spirit flower appears, the Captain's Log is done with him.
Another fucking wild little design thing is that, when you realize Atul isn't around, the game prompts you to ask your three dinner companions about him, but the quest is apparently coded in a way that assigns an order to them - you're supposed to ask Guest 1, then Guest 2, then Guest 3. Once Guest 3 is asked if they've seen Atul, Atul's flower appears and the game is done with him. Not realizing this, I asked Guest 3 second. So what happened is that the game said "ask three people where Atul is," I asked two, the game said "here's his spirit flower," and I was never able to ask a third person. No one remarked on his disappearance. No one noticed or cared that he was gone. Stella isn't allowed to emote on anything herself. There was no exposition, no sequence of Stella sitting in his workshop, nothing - the game just said "here's his flower, go fuck yourself" in a sequence that was so fucking abrupt and unceremonious that I honestly kept thinking Atul was just being held out and would appear later, maybe when it was time for Stella to go through the door herself. Their aim is to put the player through the emotional experience of having a loved one disappear with no explanation, I guess, but personally I don't think it hits because they don't use the structure of the game to give you-as-Stella a way to sit with that experience. You're just supposed to pause the game for a while and have that moment as yourself sitting on the couch, and that's not how adventure games work. The game needs to clearly convey "Atul is gone, and he's not coming back, and we're going to sit with that for a while" because otherwise the moment becomes too much about the game as a construct - wait, is he seriously gone? Did I fuck up that quest somehow? Is there going to be another quest? Can I trigger something by going here or talking to this person?
Basically, it was hugely disappointing to think that I was building to the emotional centerpiece of the game, only to get nothing.
Coincidentally, while all this was happening, I was also feeling great about how I was helping Buck by creating an experience that would fulfill him and make him feel like he was ready to move on. Before Atul disappeared, I really had a thought along the lines of "Buck's D&D group and Atul's dinner party are the best possible executions of the structure of this game because they really make me feel like I'm actively working towards an emotionally resonant goal as opposed to fetching someone items until they arbitrarily decide it's their time to go."
[Another thing Buck and Atul have in common: Poorly planned dialogue spacing! Buck had NOTHING to say to me for what felt like an eternity after he joined my ship, and I guess I ran through all of Atul's special dialogue in the early days because he had nothing to say to me except "where's my fried chicken" for the longest fucking time.]
So it's very funny to me that Buck...is the only other spirit...who you never get to take through the Everdoor. Particularly because I got to a point in the game where Buck was the only Spirit left that I felt like I really cared about, this was...something!
BUT MORE ON THAT IN A MINUTE. For now, let's talk about updates that have been made since the game was released, and how those have changed it.
First, an aside about the update that came out this week: Gustav has dialogue in the original version of the game that alludes to his MS diagnosis and its progression, and he basically talks about how hey, he may be dead but at least that means he's not disabled anymore! Which, uh, "death > disability" is not a great look! Which people rightly pointed out! Very shortly after the game was released! Over a year ago! And the devs issued an apology in September 2020 and said they would be fixing that dialogue. They pushed that update out THIS WEEK. I didn't even experience it because I had already sent Gustav through the Everdoor by the time they put out the update, THAT'S HOW FUCKING LONG THEY TOOK TO DO IT. I sincerely cannot believe the priorities that they ADDED ENTIRE STORYLINES TO THE GAME without fixing this. They have this whole explanation about how they found an organization that set them up with a few dozen disabled gamers to act as a panel and provide feedback on the story, but like...there are people you can fucking pay to consult on this stuff. It only needs to take a year to fix something like this if you want to rely on the idea of finding disabled people who will VOLUNTEER their time and effort to educate you. If it were a priority they would have fixed it SO much sooner. (I was shocked when I found out the update JUST went through, although it also made a lot of sense, because I assumed Gustav's dialogue had already been updated and as I was progressing through it I was like this is...the better version? I don't think I would have flagged it as ableist on my own but once I was paying attention to it, yikes.)
Now, on to the stuff they added that pissed me off: There was a minor-major update about a month ago. A new spirit, Beverly, was added. Along with her came a new building (an archive room where you can view projections of photos from her life). Along with that new building came a new quest for Buck (where the projector is used to view a series of treasure maps that arrive on the boat through the mailbox). Buck's quest line was originally all tied to his D&D game - once you'd assembled his group, gone to the hidden shrine with them, and lit the three towers, Buck's quests were done. Narratively, this works! With the updates, because Buck isn't going anywhere no matter what, I guess they figured it couldn't hurt to assign him some new quests, so they added a series of INFURIATING treasure hunts. You wait for a map to arrive in the mail, then you compare that map to the regular map screen, and you try to find the exact spot it's showing. You need to get close to the exact coordinates for it to work, and the maps are NOT accurate enough for that, and in one instance there is an island that can apparently just FACE DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS in different people's games, so I was like "that almost looks right but the island doesn't face the right way so it can't be that," eventually gave up and looked it up, AND FOUND OUT THE GAME IS JUST BROKEN IN THIS INFURIATING TINY WAY?
Anyway. You go and you find the treasure and then you have to wait multiple in game days for the next treasure map to surface. This is an update to the game that I feel might be fun if you already completed the game a while ago and are coming back for some extra quests, but when experienced as part of the main game it feels VERY weird to suddenly go from this very cohesive and resonant D&D themed quest to a random obscure series of needle in a haystack busywork fetch quests.
Rewinding a bit - the Buck quests were tied into the archive room, which are tied into the new spirit, Beverly. She sucks. Her name is Beverly and she always wondered whether there could have been something between her and the architect who designed her house, THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A SLAM DUNK FOR ME, but her trip to the Everdoor is tied to her having increasing memory issues, and old lady with a failing mind is...basically Alice again, only this time it was wildly annoying instead of emotional? [Actually as a nitpick here, it did always feel weird to me that Gustav is like "now that I'm in the afterlife I don't have MS anymore" and other characters remark on being young again, but Alice and Beverly both still decline from dementia? This makes perfect sense in the "Stella is having a coma dream and is remembering dead people she knew" sense because she knew Alice and Beverly when they were in decline and Gustav when he was still healthy, but AS DISCUSSED I think the coma dream explanation is dumb as hell. Yes I was the one nitpicking but I really tried not to be because it felt too Dude Nerd-ish.] A N Y W A Y they just have Beverly repeatedly be like "hey what if you built me a house" and then being like "oh lmao shit my bad you already did that," and she starts getting paranoid and thinking everyone is talking behind her back and making you ask about it and then is like "I never said that I never asked you to do that now everyone will have a bad impression of me," and it just...I can see how for someone coming back to the game to experience the new character, it wouldn't be as jarring and the new projector mechanic would be a cool thing to experience! But for me, I went through Alice's decline one day and then the next day it was like this...again? Only it's IRRITATING this time because, as I said earlier, I'm probably too impatient to be playing a game like this anyway but I especially did not take kindly to a character who just keeps repeating the same request over and over again even though I've fulfilled it. I could not WAIT to take Beverly to the door, I was so fucking sick of seeing her little [!] pop up.
The quest for Buck is also bad, but to explain why I first need to get into the major update that was made to the game about six months ago. This one added another new spirit - Lily. Lily appears after your third and final encounter with Hades the owl spirit. Lily is a cloud of butterflies and not a conventional spirit - the only interaction you can have with her on the ship is a hug, she stays in one spot, she only appears at night, and she doesn't need a home or food or anything. Lily's quests ask you to meet her at the various obol shrines around the map, where she will bring up the still images from Stella's life previously seen in the spirit owl sequences and narrate them to you. Because as it turns out, Lily is Stella's sister, sitting vigil at her bedside while Stella is in a coma, talking to her and reminiscing even though she's not sure Stella can even hear her - and Stella can, so Lily manifests in what is, after all, just Stella's coma dream.
Once you've gone to all the Lily meeting spots, Lily will tell you it's time to let go and you'll get a quest telling you to go through the Everdoor. I had to look this up, but in the original game it was Hades the owl spirit who told you this - once you take eight spirits through the door, you have that final meeting with Hades, and Hades tells you to go through the Everdoor yourself. So from your eighth spirit on, you always know you have the option of ending the game at any time, and you can either go through the door right away or take some time and go through when it feels right. That's not how it works anymore, so maybe this is "grass is always greener" thinking, but I think that would have been much better than how I experienced the ending.
Either way, it's at the eight-spirit mark that they start to point you towards the ending, but in the original game, it's direct and immediate. You drop off your eighth spirit, Hades says "hey, door's open whenever you're ready." In the updated game, it's delayed - you drop off your eighth spirit, and the game opens up a path that will eventually lead you to Lily saying "hey, door's open whenever you're ready."
The eighth time I dropped someone off, it was Bruce and Mickey. [Technically Atul was my eighth spirit to leave, but he didn't trigger the cutscene because I didn't take him to the Everdoor.] At that point, I had Stanley, Buck, and Elena left. I got back to the boat and Lily appeared. Stanley I think was pretty much ready to go, and I kept him around for a while (if I kept him happy enough he gave me drawings of other spirits and I wanted to see how many I could get), but eventually I took him through the door too. Now it's just Buck, who I love but who has me on a drawn out series of needle in a haystack treasure hunts, Elena, who is EXTREMELY MEAN AND UNPLEASANT, was still on her first set of quests, as was Lily - I assumed I had a decent way to go with both of them, so my focus was on advancing Buck. I really liked him, and I'd really enjoyed his earlier quests, so I thought that was going to be a trip through the Everdoor that HIT, and I was trying to get to that. But Buck's quests, in addition to being tedious as hell, have HUGE wait times in between. (We're talking 30-40 minutes from when you find one treasure to when you get the clue for the next one. I ended up going back to finish all the bullshit shopping list stuff today and I ended up finishing everything else and having to literally leave the Switch idling while I showered and did stuff around the house, just waiting for the next clue to arrive.) I just couldn't advance his quests fast enough, so out of necessity I started focusing on Elena and Lily. I was shocked how quickly I finished both of their questlines out - in no time, Elena was ready to go through the door, and Lily was telling me I should go through the door myself. Which, sure, I'd be ready once I finished with Buck.
I take Elena through the door. It's a mostly silent ride, which...listen, ONCE AGAIN, this game was a constant battle against my own impatience, but those canoe trips always felt too long anyway, because I'd get through the dialogue too quickly and then we'd just sit in silence for the last thirty seconds or so while I tried to remind myself to ENJOY THE TRANQUILITY or whatever. Elena having basically nothing to say...a challenge. Then we get to the door, and Elena, who has aggressively rejected hugs the entire game, is like "okay, we can hug this time. Also, I'm NOT going to leave you a spirit flower, but I will leave you something better: MORE TASKS."
So I get back to my boat, and this time there are some Lily butterflies hanging out on the canoe to signify that they're ready whenever I am. I get the [🌸] alert in the direction of Elena's house, and I'm like "that's funny, she explicitly said she wasn't going to leave me a token? Let me go check that out." And I go over there and sure enough she's left a spirit flower, and also, her ghost is there! This bitch really decided to haunt the boat to be able to keep giving me tasks! "Let me interact with her to see what tasks she has to offer me," I think. Meanwhile, Buck is throwing out a [!] trying to get my attention. I press A to ask Elena's ghost for tasks. Instead of that, we hug. I try a few more times. We just keep hugging. ELENA HATED HUGS. WHY DID SHE LEAVE A GHOST I CAN ONLY INTERACT WITH BY HUGGING?
I drop down a few levels and realize everyone's door has a ghost outside it. Ohhhh. This is a "see me off at the Everdoor" situation. But I still have to finish Buck's terrible quests and send him through! In fact, he's trying to get my attention, maybe it's time for the next one?
No, Buck wants to tell me that he's the last spirit left and, surprise, he can't go through the Everdoor, so I might as well just go through myself.
I was thrown super off base by all this hitting me in rapid succession - I had really wanted to finish Buck's quests, but here he was telling me there wasn't any point? I think I decided to keep on going and finish them out anyway, maybe the next chest was ready for me to find? Somewhere in here, Buck and Elena (sending me mail from beyond the grave) both gave me additional tasks by way of additional Francis errands, which I considered completing but then I looked at Elena's and they were all like "gather thirty of each of these plants!" which felt like bullshit. So there was a moment where I said okay, if tedious bullshit is all the game has left for me, I...guess I'll go through the door?
Except then as soon as I started heading back towards the Everdoor, Buck was like [!] HEY! and said he had another quest for me. This time he wanted me to track down someone called the Lizard King. And I was like oh, this is actually really great, because I had spoken to the Lizard King a few times already, one of them during a Buck quest because I was like no WAY he isn't one of Buck's little tabletop nerd buddies. So I was like cool, maybe Buck DOES have some more quality stuff that feels more character relevant than the wild goose chase he had me on before.
The Lizard King was just like "give me twenty carrots" so I gave him twenty carrots. Buck had some dialogue after I finished the quest but then...that was it. It had just been one last semi-relevant quest, I guess.
So I went through the Everdoor because my only other options were to spend DAYS of in-game time doing the extremely tedious shit the game had saved for last.
Because I was paddling myself, the trip down the river was silent, which, see above re: impatience, and might have gone over better with me had I not JUST done a mostly-silent trip down the river with Elena like seven minutes earlier.
And then the game was over!
Absolutely no one is reading this, especially not at this point, but I detailed the end of my game in EXCRUCIATING detail to contrast it with what would have happened before all the extra content was introduced:
Bruce and Mickey are now my eighth spirit to leave no matter how you count it. After I see them off, Hades the owl spirit would tell me it was time to go through the Everdoor myself. At that point, I would have had Stanley, Buck, and Elena left. Stanley would be pretty much ready to go, and maybe I'd still keep him around for a while, or maybe I'd just take him through the door because I knew the end was close. Once I took Stanley through the door, I would have noticed the ghosts when I went back to his house for his spirit flower, so that reveal would hit as intended and I wouldn't have been confused and thrown off by Elena's ghost. Buck and Elena would be my only remaining passengers. Buck would have been silent for a while at this point - I'd finished his D&D quests, he wouldn't have any more after that, and I would have been wondering why he wasn't asking me to go through the door. All I would have had left was Elena's tasks. I'd go do those for lack of anything else to complete, and then I'd drop her off when she asked me. When I returned to the boat, I would have gotten the [!] from Buck and gone over to him, and him saying "I can't go through the door" would have made some kind of sense - I would have been wondering, at that point, why he hadn't asked to go through yet.
It would have made sense that it was time. Buck's ending would have been the answer to a question I had been asking, and wouldn't have felt like it yanked the rug out from under me.
Maybe I still would have seen that I had the option to do a bunch of bullshit errands if I felt like it, but it would feel like two separate paths: I could go through the Everdoor, or I could run some errands if I really wanted to prolong the experience, but it would be with the understanding that they were only there so I could prolong the experience.
Maybe that's an idealized way of thinking about it! But triggering the option of the ending after eight spirits makes a certain amount of sense - numbers are getting low on the boat, the player is running out of things to do, and it gets them thinking about the end while they still have time to make that decision. It fits with the theme of the game - you-as-Stella, like all your spirit charges before you, will choose to go through the Everdoor once you feel ready.
Instead, the game now delays that trigger - it doesn't happen after eight spirits, it happens after eight spirits plus however long it takes you to complete Lily's quest line. Adding a spirit at this point inaccurately implies that there is more road left ahead of the player than there actually is.
On top of that, there are the changes to Buck's quests. In the original game, Buck would be inexplicably silent for a while. I would expect him to want to go through the Everdoor, and he wouldn't ask me to take him.
Instead, his treasure hunt quest triggered before I had any idea I was close to the end. Buck had me doing tedious bullshit that, again, inaccurately implied a decent amount of road was left ahead of me, and then suddenly in the midst of that he was like "you might have guessed this already, but I can't go through the Everdoor!" while I wondered why in the flying fuck I ever would have GUESSED that.
Finally, delaying the Everdoor trigger increases the chance that the first ghost discovered will be Elena's, which is confusing as hell.
IDK! Overall it just seems like the original ending was built with the understanding that it made sense to give the player the option of the Everdoor at the 8 mark, because that's around the time they'd start noticing they were about to run out of content. They ease you into the idea that your time in the game is coming to an end. That feels very thematically fitting!
In the new ending, they've added Lily and her accompanying quests, which serves to obscure that the game is winding down, particularly in conjunction with Buck's quests, which obscure the fact that Buck is supposed to...well, buck the trend by not asking to go to the Everdoor when all his quests are complete. There was originally something of a divide between the core game and the completionist extras, so the game was essentially saying "you're done with everything we really wanted you to do, and we can either call it a day OR you can do this bonus stuff," but the addition of all the update content obscures that now, and it all runs together - stuff that is supposed to be a "bonus" for completionists gets mixed in with the core game, and it completely throws off the balance and makes the game feel like it's run out of ideas before you've reached the end. If I had finished Spiritfarer eight months ago, I probably would have enjoyed trying out the Lily stuff* in the spring, and then trying out the Beverly and Buck stuff this month! The new tasks work as add-ons for returning players, but I don't think the devs properly considered how they fuck with the flow of the original game.
*To be clear I feel like I would also hate the Lily STORY in this context, because as I've said, "it was all a coma dream" is an obnoxiously literal explanation for a game that feels like it should not be literal at all. But I can see it being enjoyable to people who were upset because they wanted the Lost finale to answer all their lore questions.
LOOK, ULTIMATELY, I REALLY WANTED TO LIKE THIS GAME, and I struggled a lot with its rough edges but I think I really did get into a groove with it - I mean, I played this thing for OBSCENELY long stretches of time, and that doesn't happen with a game that doesn't have SOMETHING compelling going for it - only to be severely thrown off that groove by the way old and new and base game and postgame all collided at the end. It sucks! I really thought we were going to come in at a 3.5/5 where I could say, like I have with a handful of other games, that I enjoyed it enough to wish it had been better executed. And then the ending happened to me and I just...3/5 somehow felt both cruel and way too high? I was all over the fucking place. This post is closing in on nine thousand words and I STILL feel like I have feelings that need exorcising. I JUST WISH IT HAD LET ME HAVE A BETTER TIME IS ALL!!!!!!!
If you read all of this...I'm sorry, and also why?
Also I just found out that Daffodil the cat is canonically a boy and I reject that.
So basically, under the cut, I will be saying a lot of negative things about a game that I know many people loved and that I also expected to love! I don't think it's a bad game in the sense that I don't understand why people liked it, I just think it's badly made in a million little ways that I ultimately just couldn't forgive, potentially because the core gameplay is just not my kind of thing.
Spoilers for all of it! Even if you have played Spiritfarer before: Spoilers for new content that came out over the course of 2021, some of which significantly impacts the ending! Spoilers for not-in-the-game content where the creators have explained the events of the game in an extremely literal manner!
This game. Ohhhhhh this game. I think the very foundation of all my issues is this: I never bought Animal Crossing when everyone and their mother was playing it because I simply did not think I would find it interesting. I am just not huge on crafting as a game's Vibe! I am very into crafting if it's like, poisoned by capitalism, because then I feel like I can win at it by incessantly scaling up even though I am actually just dooming myself to a pointless cycle and allowing myself to be blinded to that face by the dopamine hit of watching numbers go up. I also don't mind management sims when there are a lot of moving parts to keep track of and while you're fixing A, B is catching fire, because my brain loves that shit!
I just don't ever give a shit about the cooking part of games, and this is very much a game for people who enjoy the cooking part of games.
So that's what underlies all the other issues! I could have overcome that on its own, but this game is just so full of inconveniences (some of them unintentional technical issues, some of them so much a part of the game that it honestly feels like they made it miserably tedious on purpose) that I ended up constantly fighting back my own annoyance. I'm an impatient person! I probably shouldn't have played this in the first place! This is not the first time THIS YEAR that I have started playing a game I thought I would love because I knew a lot of other people liked it and been shocked to realize that I apparently only listened to plot descriptions while every word about the game's genre went in one ear and out the other! I don't know why I'm like this!
This is going to be unstructured as hell so for now let me just exorcise some of that annoyance by firing off grievances at random:
1. LACK OF POLISH: Things in this game cut each other off all the time in a way that constantly threw me off balance. I'd be having an important plot conversation with a spirit and then all of a sudden the screen would cut to the "DISCOVERED A NEW ISLAND" graphic. I'd be making logs and trying to focus on the little dots I'm supposed to hit and then suddenly the game zooms way the fuck out to show me that the boat hit a crate. I start talking to a flying spirit and they try to land in front of me but I was standing at the edge of a building so they just fall down the gap and I have no idea if I've missed the opportunity to get that scripted conversation or not.
2. AGGRESSIVELY TEDIOUS: The loom was fucking great. Then the sawmill came along and I fucking hated it but you know what, I got the hang of it. We made it work. Then the foundry! I also eventually got the hang of that but it never stopped being terrible having to take a fucking eternity to make a copper ingot or whatever! Except you know what? Then the smithy came along and recontextualized what I thought of when I thought "eternity" and the foundry became comparatively easy to bear. ME IN THE SMITHY HITTING THIS LITTLE YELLOW BLOB OVER AND OVER AGAIN, 50+ TIMES, YES I WAS COUNTING, KNOWING I HAVE TO DO THIS SEVERAL MORE TIMES? And then....the windmill. WHAT FUCKING SADIST MADE THE WINDMILL? WHY DOES IT TAKE FOUR HUNDRED FUCKING YEARS TO MAKE ONE THING OF FLOUR? WHY DOES NO ONE EVER EXPLAIN TO STELLA HOW IT WORKS SO I HAD TO LOOK IT UP BC THE SILHOUETTE OF THE BLADE OF THE WINDMILL WAS IN FRONT OF THE ALREADY INSCRUTABLE MECHANISM? WHY DO I HAVE TO CONSTANTLY RETURN TO THE WINDMILL TO READJUST THE THING SO THE WINDMILL WILL START SPINNING AGAIN, ONLY TO STOP PENDING READJUSTMENT AFTER THIRTY SECOND HAVE ELAPSED? WHY IS THE UPGRADE FOR THE WINDMILL, WHICH MAKES IT PRODUCE TWO BAGS OF FLOUR FOR EACH CENTURIES-LONG ORDEAL AND IS THEREFORE THE SINGLE BIGGEST EFFICIENCY GAIN IN THE ENTIRE GAME, THE REWARD FOR A SIDEQUEST ON THE STARTING ISLAND, A LOCATION WITH NO RESOURCES AND NO PLOT RELEVANCE THAT I DID NOT REVISIT UNTIL, THIRTY HOURS INTO THE GAME, I GOOGLED "SPIRITFARER WINDMILL UPGRADE." WHO DID THIS. WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS ACCEPTABLE. WHY IS IT LIKE THIS??????? (The crusher rules and everything else should have followed its example.)
3. It's also frustrating as hell to have all these production facilities that require prompt and precise reaction to whatever animation they're showing you...in a game that's designed so that people passing by outside the building obscure that animation.
4. As the game progressed my elaborate floating city got bigger and bigger and my passengers got smaller and smaller. Really could have used a Marauder's Map or something because tracking down Buck in particular was always a fucking nightmare.
5. I was constantly trying to track down Buck even when he wasn't throwing the little [!] icon to let me know he had something to say, because Buck's mood gauge said if I kept him happy he would harvest XP Potion for me, so I needed to keep finding him to keep him fed and hugged so he would GIVE ME XP POTION, because across all upgrades you need like 45 bottles of the stuff, and the XP Potion minigame is a fucking SCAM in which sometimes I would only be presented with three glowing purple guys and some of those would be back to back so I'd only get two bottles from the whole fucking minigame, and it's like two in-game days before you can repeat it, and it was just! FUCKING EXHAUSTING! So it would be NICE, if keeping Buck fed and happy meant he would in turn SUPPLY ME WITH XP POTION, but he never fucking did because the mood system is a fucking SCAM and they shouldn't even be advertising these fucking production rewards at the happiest end of the scale because AT BEST it's Atul periodically offering me like three planks? ATUL I LOVE YOU AND I APPRECIATE IT BUT YOU WEREN'T EXACTLY MAKING A DENT, YOU KNOW?
6. This game crashed on me something like ten times while I was playing it. I think in the entirety of the time I've had my Switch, during which I've played something like sixty different games, I had experienced one or two crashes total before I started playing Spiritfarer. It crashed CONSTANTLY. And most games these days, which do not crash constantly, have extremely diligent autosave features, so even if they do crash, when you open the game back up again you're only losing the last minute or two of what you played. Spiritfarer crashes constantly AND has a ridiculously weak autosave system. It saves when you go to islands, it saves when you come back from islands, and it saves when you sleep. So if you spend a long stretch of time on your boat - something you would only do if you were, say, crafting a lot, or going deep in your inventory and your blueprint table to get everything upgraded, and the game crashed, you would lose all of that fucking MINUTIAE, because you didn't do anything during that time that would trigger the autosave. Now maybe it's just a confirmation bias thing and it feels like the game always crashed when I was 20-30 minutes into some minutiae just because those are the ones that stand out to me as most inconvenient, but if I talk out my ass it does make SOME KIND OF TECHNICAL SENSE that, when you go a long time without saving, the game's list of Things It Needs To Incorporate Into The Save gets longer and longer, and possibly! Maybe! That could be something that literally CAUSES a crash. I don't know. (And there were I think two instances where the game crashed almost immediately after I slept or left an island so I basically only lost seconds, but its unfailing tendency to crash when I was knee deep in inventory management definitely SEEMS like there has to be some causation there.)
One way to mitigate this, if it's somehow just NOT POSSIBLE to make the game autosave every time Stella enters a crafting station, or every two minutes, or SOMETHING that doesn't completely fuck over players who take the "farm and craft and fish to your heart's content!" premise of this game seriously, would be a manual save! Some games don't even have an autosave and they just TELL the player this and encourage them to manually save on a regular basis! They just have to hit Start and then Save and then Start again and they go on with their game! It's very easy!
Spiritfarer only has Save & Quit which is the wildest fucking thing I have ever seen. WHAT IS THIS, MAJORA'S MASK? Limiting you to Save & Quit (and not including Save & Continue) is a hallmark of games that want you to respect the challenge of how hard they are (the idea being that they're fine with you saving if it's because you're stepping away from the game, but they don't want you saving just because you think something difficult is about to happen and you don't want to lose your progress if you die), which is CLEARLY not the intention here. It is UNHINGED that this game got me in the habit of quitting out to the menu screen and immediately restarting the game just because I was so sick of repeating 20-30 minutes of tedious bullshit that I was willing to play along with this ridiculous save system. THEIR OFFICIAL WEBSITE IS LITERALLY LIKE "YES WE DO CRASH ALL THE TIME ON SWITCH. HAVE YOU TRIED DOING SAVE & QUIT CONSTANTLY?" Like...could nobody advise the dev team on how to fix this? It's been out for a YEAR.
(One time I was fucking furious because as part of A Big Sequence of Inventory Noodling, I realized I needed more quartz or whatever, so I headed over to the nearest turtle to plant what I had, and when I got to the turtle I was like you know what I've been noodling without saving for a WHILE, let me save now before this game crashes and I throw my controller at the screen, but because it's Save & Quit and this game is needlessly aggravating at all times WHEN I LOADED THE GAME BACK UP THE TURTLE WAS GONE BC THE GAME WAS LIKE "WELL U ALREADY VISITED HER" EVEN THOUGH I DIDN'T DO A DAMN THING? Stop punishing me for trying to work with your garbage limitations!!!!)
7. WHY CAN'T I SAIL AT NIGHT? Granted I ended up halfway grateful for this because the only thing that ended up saving me in some of those crashes was that whenever night rolled around and the ship stopped moving, I promptly sent Stella to bed because crafting while the ship wasn't moving felt unbearable inefficient. But EVERY TIME THIS HAPPENS it's a twenty second transition. WHY CAN'T I JUST SAIL AT NIGHT? Or purchase an early upgrade to let me sail at night? I'M REALLY SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THAT THIS ALL POWERFUL ARTIFACT CALLED THE EVERLIGHT THAT I RECEIVED FROM FUCKING CHARON JUST...STOPS WORKING BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAWN? Where was that in the fine print? It works underground in a pitch black mine but at night it stops working until the sun comes back up? It doesn't even have enough juice for me to PULL UP A MAP? WHAT IS THAT? CAN YOU REALLY CALL IT THE EVERLIGHT? I assumed this was a technical limitation of some kind and I was Learning To Accept It but then Lily showed up and it was like GREAT NEWS: NOW THAT THE GAME'S BASICALLY OVER (more on this later), YOU CAN TRAVEL AT NIGHT. I could have been doing this the WHOLE TIME and they just didn't let me for no fucking reason?
8. God this game needs a better menu system. There are way too many categories of items and I could never remember where rare shit like Lightning in a Bottle was supposed to be - I'd just be paging through all ten or twelve item categories never sure if I was overlooking it or if I just didn't have any. The map should have been accessible at all times or at LEAST something that would tell me WHAT ISLAND I WAS ON WHILE I WAS ON IT. Trying to find the right cooked dish when I had dozens of them in inventory was a fucking mess. Having to go to the edit screen and manually select every single building on the boat just to figure out which ones had upgrades available was fucking ridiculous. Literally EVERY SINGLE ASPECT of this game is rough and unpolished in some way that it doesn't need to be.
9. It's really great that they added an option to turn off the music for Alex the bus driving seal. Good for them for realizing people might want to stick around at a bus stop for a while (or might have to if they arrived just as the Everlight's curfew hit) and wouldn't want to listen to that music on a loop indefinitely! Here's my question: Why does the option to turn it off come with NINE lines of dialogue to page through? Granted, you can just hit the button to turn off the music and then cancel out the conversation immediately and the music will still be off. You know what you do have to go all the way through to turn the music back on? The NINETEEN lines of dialogue that accompany the "on" option. NINETEEN! And it's not the first time. It's EVERY time. If you cancel out of the conversation at any point before it ends, the music won't come back.
10. It's very annoying that "I'm hungry" dialogue prioritizes over legit plot/relationship dialogue. Yeah, Gwen, of course you're hungry, all I have is fruit and you won't eat it. I was really prioritizing keeping everyone fed and happy in the first few hours I played this before I realized it was making me hate the game, so I stopped, and it was just very annoying to have to skip through "I'm starving" dialogue and then interact AGAIN to see if characters had anything interesting to say. Am I a monster? Maybe.
11. It's weird how strongly some things are telegraphed (I got the little "hold A for as long as you can! No, not that long" message every time I accidentally fucked up a swing while mining, even 20+ hours in), when plenty of things just aren't at all - nothing indicates that it's possible to get progressively higher and higher bounces, and it's one thing for bonus chests to be inaccessible without that knowledge but so is one that's required to be able to move Beverly's story along. Also the first time I ended up in Owl Spirit Limbo I had no idea I had to interact with the butterflies to get them to move platforms around so I could progress (would this have been clearer in the old version of the game, when they were just a ball of light? I DON'T KNOW BUT PROBABLY). I thought I was just somehow failing at navigating the platforms and I had to check a walkthrough to find out I was just supposed to hit A by the butterflies. I also had no idea I needed to plant Mysterious Seed until I got to a point where I couldn't advance in the game without Bottled Ectoplasm and googled where I was supposed to be finding it. The item description for Mysterious Seed is very "this thing is moving and weird and I should plant it ASAP" but you don't see the description when you get the seed - you just catch it fishing, and up to that point the only things you catch fishing are 1) fish, 2) trash, and 3) items with no use beyond their monetary value. I was not in the habit of being like "oh, I just caught an item I haven't seen before, let me page through all nine million sections of inventory and find it so I can read its description" but maybe that's on me!
12. The cat is extremely cute. Cutting down trees with the cat using our shared Everlight saw (WHICH WORKS 24 HOURS A DAY I CAN'T HELP BUT NOTICE) is extremely cute and on the level of tedious repetition I can handle. When you get to the final area, with all the mist and the pine trees, the cat cannot navigate the platforms for SHIT which means every fucking time I want to cut down a tree, I have to hit A, watch Stella stand there and wait for the cat for like ten seconds, and then eventually there is an animation where the cat inflates like a balloon to beeline its way to your side. It's very cute! But it is coming after what was already an unreasonably long delay! BE BETTER AT DESIGNING AROUND THESE THINGS, PLEASE.
"END" OF LIST, mainly because that is everything I can think of right now in terms of minor-or-maybe-not quality of life issues, because I did not catalogue my minor gameplay grievances as I went because I WAS TRYING TO ENJOY MYSELF. But there were just constantly a million little things like those working against me! I HAD TO TRY VERY HARD!
Now, as for story and the overall structure of the game. To be perfectly honest, I didn't really get super invested in most of the characters, so emotionally the game didn't especially hit. Because so many of them knew Stella when she was alive, it felt more like I was trying to piece together their existing relationship with Stella than it felt like Sarah-as-Stella was forming a relationship with them, and it feels like a huge missed opportunity to me that they don't build relationships with each other (everyone gathering at the stern of the boat to see departing spirits off to the Everdoor always hit for me and I wish there had been more to it beyond just the ritual). Weirdly it was the shittiest spirits I felt some of the strongest bonds with - Giovanni and Bruce&Mickey. Even though most of the spirits had nicknames for me, Giovanni calling me PEANUT always hit???? I was so disappointed in him when I realized he was gleefully cheating on Astrid???? I CRIED WHEN HE WENT THROUGH THE DOOR. Anyway I guess it makes sense that if a lot of the relationships didn't work for me because I felt like I was supposed to take the existing Stella connection as my own, the ones that DID work most for me were the ones where I-as-Stella actually had to work to forge a connection.
An exception is Atul, who was, yes, Stella's uncle, but was affectionate enough with Stella that it worked - like, that's how any decent uncle relationship starts, with you as a kid just being like I don't really care that you're my dad's brother but you're very nice to me and it's fun to have you around! And for whatever reason Atul was VERY good at staying in a very good mood with relatively little input from me, and he's just around for so long in the game that he became a fixture to me - Atul exclaiming over berries on an island and then bringing me some, Atul in his workshop making me planks, Atul playing his music, Atul doing repairs - and it was clear enough from how his requests were different from, say, Gwen's and Summer's, that the game was structured so that he would be around for a long time and wouldn't be one of my first to go. (This was extended by me not realizing that Fat was not an ingredient I had to find in a store but rather a category of ingredients, some of which I could just make on my own - I probably could have made him his fried chicken much earlier than I did.)
I thought it was beautiful that his story involved organizing a big dinner for us and some of the other spirits, and it's one of the things in the game that fits best with how I think I imagined Spiritfarer - I felt like I understood how I was creating something that was meaningful to him, that echoed the kind of thing he loved to do in life, and that would help him to feel like he could move on. A lot of the other spirits' quests just felt like humoring them until they decided on their own that it was time to go, but Atul's felt like I was actively shepherding him towards that, and I was really meta-looking-forward to taking him through the Everdoor. I didn't want him to go, but that's what I was looking forward to, the experience of knowing that it was someone's time to go even though it broke my heart to take them. And I was really looking forward to seeing what he would have to say on the way to the door!
So of course he just vanishes with no warning, no fanfare, and no one having any kind of reaction to it.
This will seem like a huge immediate subject change but bear with me - Spiritfarer has an art book that the devs put out, with concept art and explanations from the devs about design choices and story choices. And while Spiritfarer the game, as it was originally released a year ago, is a fantastical story, both the art book and the updates that were made to the game this year turn it into an extremely literal one: The reason Stella knows so many of these spirits is because actually, she knows all of them, she is in a coma she won't ever wake up from and the entire game is a dream, where as she approaches death her mind casts back to all these people she has known who died. She was a nurse who provided end of life care, and many of these people were her patients or their loved ones. Alice was the first patient she had who passed away. Stanley was a child who was a patient of hers. Mickey doesn't talk because she only ever knew him as a coma patient; it was his brother Bruce who she saw around all the time as he stayed by Mickey's side. Atul disappears because in "real life," Stella's uncle disappeared and she never knew what happened to him.
I...hate this? I hate this so much. I hate that within the reality of the game, none of this actually fucking happened. I hate that all of these spirits were just the imaginings of Stella's dying mind. I hate that everything was just a rehash of what she "really" went through. I hate that the experience I thought I was having isn't true. I hate that they did the whole thing by just releasing extremely detailed and literal explanations after the fact instead of, if that's the story they wanted to tell, making it the story they told.
I hate how this undercuts Bruce and Mickey's trip through the Everdoor, which NEARLY MADE ME CRY. It fucking HIT for me when they're going through the door and Bruce admits that Mickey's been gone for a while, it's just taken him some time to accept that Bruce needs to go as well. That was really fucking interesting to me! But actually it means Mickey was in a fucking coma and Bruce needed to accept that he was gone. THIS GAME LOVES A GOOD COMA.
Most of all, I hate how this plays out with Atul. Why does Atul disappear and leave a spirit flower without being taken to the Everdoor? Because in "real life," Stella's uncle Atul disappeared with no warning and she never knew what happened to him. Okay, but...why. This is a CHOICE. This is what they decided to do with this story! They decided to structure Atul's quest so that you can't possibly complete it until the last third of the game. They decided to keep him around longer than almost any other spirit, so that he would feel like a fixture in a way no one else does. And if they wanted his story to be one about how you don't always get an explanation and you don't always get to say goodbye, fine! But it is fucking WILD to me that the game's way of doing this is just "he's gone, that's it, no comment, no one cares, we will not be addressing this again." It's not real life, it's a constructed narrative, with a heavy emphasis on CONSTRUCTED. Most games have constructed narratives but in this case the structure is always extremely apparent because it takes the form of your quest to-do list - the game uses this to tell you what the story is, and what's coming next, and who's Going Through Something, and where your emotional focus should be. Things don't happen if they don't happen in that Captain's Log screen, and as soon as Atul's spirit flower appears, the Captain's Log is done with him.
Another fucking wild little design thing is that, when you realize Atul isn't around, the game prompts you to ask your three dinner companions about him, but the quest is apparently coded in a way that assigns an order to them - you're supposed to ask Guest 1, then Guest 2, then Guest 3. Once Guest 3 is asked if they've seen Atul, Atul's flower appears and the game is done with him. Not realizing this, I asked Guest 3 second. So what happened is that the game said "ask three people where Atul is," I asked two, the game said "here's his spirit flower," and I was never able to ask a third person. No one remarked on his disappearance. No one noticed or cared that he was gone. Stella isn't allowed to emote on anything herself. There was no exposition, no sequence of Stella sitting in his workshop, nothing - the game just said "here's his flower, go fuck yourself" in a sequence that was so fucking abrupt and unceremonious that I honestly kept thinking Atul was just being held out and would appear later, maybe when it was time for Stella to go through the door herself. Their aim is to put the player through the emotional experience of having a loved one disappear with no explanation, I guess, but personally I don't think it hits because they don't use the structure of the game to give you-as-Stella a way to sit with that experience. You're just supposed to pause the game for a while and have that moment as yourself sitting on the couch, and that's not how adventure games work. The game needs to clearly convey "Atul is gone, and he's not coming back, and we're going to sit with that for a while" because otherwise the moment becomes too much about the game as a construct - wait, is he seriously gone? Did I fuck up that quest somehow? Is there going to be another quest? Can I trigger something by going here or talking to this person?
Basically, it was hugely disappointing to think that I was building to the emotional centerpiece of the game, only to get nothing.
Coincidentally, while all this was happening, I was also feeling great about how I was helping Buck by creating an experience that would fulfill him and make him feel like he was ready to move on. Before Atul disappeared, I really had a thought along the lines of "Buck's D&D group and Atul's dinner party are the best possible executions of the structure of this game because they really make me feel like I'm actively working towards an emotionally resonant goal as opposed to fetching someone items until they arbitrarily decide it's their time to go."
[Another thing Buck and Atul have in common: Poorly planned dialogue spacing! Buck had NOTHING to say to me for what felt like an eternity after he joined my ship, and I guess I ran through all of Atul's special dialogue in the early days because he had nothing to say to me except "where's my fried chicken" for the longest fucking time.]
So it's very funny to me that Buck...is the only other spirit...who you never get to take through the Everdoor. Particularly because I got to a point in the game where Buck was the only Spirit left that I felt like I really cared about, this was...something!
BUT MORE ON THAT IN A MINUTE. For now, let's talk about updates that have been made since the game was released, and how those have changed it.
First, an aside about the update that came out this week: Gustav has dialogue in the original version of the game that alludes to his MS diagnosis and its progression, and he basically talks about how hey, he may be dead but at least that means he's not disabled anymore! Which, uh, "death > disability" is not a great look! Which people rightly pointed out! Very shortly after the game was released! Over a year ago! And the devs issued an apology in September 2020 and said they would be fixing that dialogue. They pushed that update out THIS WEEK. I didn't even experience it because I had already sent Gustav through the Everdoor by the time they put out the update, THAT'S HOW FUCKING LONG THEY TOOK TO DO IT. I sincerely cannot believe the priorities that they ADDED ENTIRE STORYLINES TO THE GAME without fixing this. They have this whole explanation about how they found an organization that set them up with a few dozen disabled gamers to act as a panel and provide feedback on the story, but like...there are people you can fucking pay to consult on this stuff. It only needs to take a year to fix something like this if you want to rely on the idea of finding disabled people who will VOLUNTEER their time and effort to educate you. If it were a priority they would have fixed it SO much sooner. (I was shocked when I found out the update JUST went through, although it also made a lot of sense, because I assumed Gustav's dialogue had already been updated and as I was progressing through it I was like this is...the better version? I don't think I would have flagged it as ableist on my own but once I was paying attention to it, yikes.)
Now, on to the stuff they added that pissed me off: There was a minor-major update about a month ago. A new spirit, Beverly, was added. Along with her came a new building (an archive room where you can view projections of photos from her life). Along with that new building came a new quest for Buck (where the projector is used to view a series of treasure maps that arrive on the boat through the mailbox). Buck's quest line was originally all tied to his D&D game - once you'd assembled his group, gone to the hidden shrine with them, and lit the three towers, Buck's quests were done. Narratively, this works! With the updates, because Buck isn't going anywhere no matter what, I guess they figured it couldn't hurt to assign him some new quests, so they added a series of INFURIATING treasure hunts. You wait for a map to arrive in the mail, then you compare that map to the regular map screen, and you try to find the exact spot it's showing. You need to get close to the exact coordinates for it to work, and the maps are NOT accurate enough for that, and in one instance there is an island that can apparently just FACE DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS in different people's games, so I was like "that almost looks right but the island doesn't face the right way so it can't be that," eventually gave up and looked it up, AND FOUND OUT THE GAME IS JUST BROKEN IN THIS INFURIATING TINY WAY?
Anyway. You go and you find the treasure and then you have to wait multiple in game days for the next treasure map to surface. This is an update to the game that I feel might be fun if you already completed the game a while ago and are coming back for some extra quests, but when experienced as part of the main game it feels VERY weird to suddenly go from this very cohesive and resonant D&D themed quest to a random obscure series of needle in a haystack busywork fetch quests.
Rewinding a bit - the Buck quests were tied into the archive room, which are tied into the new spirit, Beverly. She sucks. Her name is Beverly and she always wondered whether there could have been something between her and the architect who designed her house, THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A SLAM DUNK FOR ME, but her trip to the Everdoor is tied to her having increasing memory issues, and old lady with a failing mind is...basically Alice again, only this time it was wildly annoying instead of emotional? [Actually as a nitpick here, it did always feel weird to me that Gustav is like "now that I'm in the afterlife I don't have MS anymore" and other characters remark on being young again, but Alice and Beverly both still decline from dementia? This makes perfect sense in the "Stella is having a coma dream and is remembering dead people she knew" sense because she knew Alice and Beverly when they were in decline and Gustav when he was still healthy, but AS DISCUSSED I think the coma dream explanation is dumb as hell. Yes I was the one nitpicking but I really tried not to be because it felt too Dude Nerd-ish.] A N Y W A Y they just have Beverly repeatedly be like "hey what if you built me a house" and then being like "oh lmao shit my bad you already did that," and she starts getting paranoid and thinking everyone is talking behind her back and making you ask about it and then is like "I never said that I never asked you to do that now everyone will have a bad impression of me," and it just...I can see how for someone coming back to the game to experience the new character, it wouldn't be as jarring and the new projector mechanic would be a cool thing to experience! But for me, I went through Alice's decline one day and then the next day it was like this...again? Only it's IRRITATING this time because, as I said earlier, I'm probably too impatient to be playing a game like this anyway but I especially did not take kindly to a character who just keeps repeating the same request over and over again even though I've fulfilled it. I could not WAIT to take Beverly to the door, I was so fucking sick of seeing her little [!] pop up.
The quest for Buck is also bad, but to explain why I first need to get into the major update that was made to the game about six months ago. This one added another new spirit - Lily. Lily appears after your third and final encounter with Hades the owl spirit. Lily is a cloud of butterflies and not a conventional spirit - the only interaction you can have with her on the ship is a hug, she stays in one spot, she only appears at night, and she doesn't need a home or food or anything. Lily's quests ask you to meet her at the various obol shrines around the map, where she will bring up the still images from Stella's life previously seen in the spirit owl sequences and narrate them to you. Because as it turns out, Lily is Stella's sister, sitting vigil at her bedside while Stella is in a coma, talking to her and reminiscing even though she's not sure Stella can even hear her - and Stella can, so Lily manifests in what is, after all, just Stella's coma dream.
Once you've gone to all the Lily meeting spots, Lily will tell you it's time to let go and you'll get a quest telling you to go through the Everdoor. I had to look this up, but in the original game it was Hades the owl spirit who told you this - once you take eight spirits through the door, you have that final meeting with Hades, and Hades tells you to go through the Everdoor yourself. So from your eighth spirit on, you always know you have the option of ending the game at any time, and you can either go through the door right away or take some time and go through when it feels right. That's not how it works anymore, so maybe this is "grass is always greener" thinking, but I think that would have been much better than how I experienced the ending.
Either way, it's at the eight-spirit mark that they start to point you towards the ending, but in the original game, it's direct and immediate. You drop off your eighth spirit, Hades says "hey, door's open whenever you're ready." In the updated game, it's delayed - you drop off your eighth spirit, and the game opens up a path that will eventually lead you to Lily saying "hey, door's open whenever you're ready."
The eighth time I dropped someone off, it was Bruce and Mickey. [Technically Atul was my eighth spirit to leave, but he didn't trigger the cutscene because I didn't take him to the Everdoor.] At that point, I had Stanley, Buck, and Elena left. I got back to the boat and Lily appeared. Stanley I think was pretty much ready to go, and I kept him around for a while (if I kept him happy enough he gave me drawings of other spirits and I wanted to see how many I could get), but eventually I took him through the door too. Now it's just Buck, who I love but who has me on a drawn out series of needle in a haystack treasure hunts, Elena, who is EXTREMELY MEAN AND UNPLEASANT, was still on her first set of quests, as was Lily - I assumed I had a decent way to go with both of them, so my focus was on advancing Buck. I really liked him, and I'd really enjoyed his earlier quests, so I thought that was going to be a trip through the Everdoor that HIT, and I was trying to get to that. But Buck's quests, in addition to being tedious as hell, have HUGE wait times in between. (We're talking 30-40 minutes from when you find one treasure to when you get the clue for the next one. I ended up going back to finish all the bullshit shopping list stuff today and I ended up finishing everything else and having to literally leave the Switch idling while I showered and did stuff around the house, just waiting for the next clue to arrive.) I just couldn't advance his quests fast enough, so out of necessity I started focusing on Elena and Lily. I was shocked how quickly I finished both of their questlines out - in no time, Elena was ready to go through the door, and Lily was telling me I should go through the door myself. Which, sure, I'd be ready once I finished with Buck.
I take Elena through the door. It's a mostly silent ride, which...listen, ONCE AGAIN, this game was a constant battle against my own impatience, but those canoe trips always felt too long anyway, because I'd get through the dialogue too quickly and then we'd just sit in silence for the last thirty seconds or so while I tried to remind myself to ENJOY THE TRANQUILITY or whatever. Elena having basically nothing to say...a challenge. Then we get to the door, and Elena, who has aggressively rejected hugs the entire game, is like "okay, we can hug this time. Also, I'm NOT going to leave you a spirit flower, but I will leave you something better: MORE TASKS."
So I get back to my boat, and this time there are some Lily butterflies hanging out on the canoe to signify that they're ready whenever I am. I get the [🌸] alert in the direction of Elena's house, and I'm like "that's funny, she explicitly said she wasn't going to leave me a token? Let me go check that out." And I go over there and sure enough she's left a spirit flower, and also, her ghost is there! This bitch really decided to haunt the boat to be able to keep giving me tasks! "Let me interact with her to see what tasks she has to offer me," I think. Meanwhile, Buck is throwing out a [!] trying to get my attention. I press A to ask Elena's ghost for tasks. Instead of that, we hug. I try a few more times. We just keep hugging. ELENA HATED HUGS. WHY DID SHE LEAVE A GHOST I CAN ONLY INTERACT WITH BY HUGGING?
I drop down a few levels and realize everyone's door has a ghost outside it. Ohhhh. This is a "see me off at the Everdoor" situation. But I still have to finish Buck's terrible quests and send him through! In fact, he's trying to get my attention, maybe it's time for the next one?
No, Buck wants to tell me that he's the last spirit left and, surprise, he can't go through the Everdoor, so I might as well just go through myself.
I was thrown super off base by all this hitting me in rapid succession - I had really wanted to finish Buck's quests, but here he was telling me there wasn't any point? I think I decided to keep on going and finish them out anyway, maybe the next chest was ready for me to find? Somewhere in here, Buck and Elena (sending me mail from beyond the grave) both gave me additional tasks by way of additional Francis errands, which I considered completing but then I looked at Elena's and they were all like "gather thirty of each of these plants!" which felt like bullshit. So there was a moment where I said okay, if tedious bullshit is all the game has left for me, I...guess I'll go through the door?
Except then as soon as I started heading back towards the Everdoor, Buck was like [!] HEY! and said he had another quest for me. This time he wanted me to track down someone called the Lizard King. And I was like oh, this is actually really great, because I had spoken to the Lizard King a few times already, one of them during a Buck quest because I was like no WAY he isn't one of Buck's little tabletop nerd buddies. So I was like cool, maybe Buck DOES have some more quality stuff that feels more character relevant than the wild goose chase he had me on before.
The Lizard King was just like "give me twenty carrots" so I gave him twenty carrots. Buck had some dialogue after I finished the quest but then...that was it. It had just been one last semi-relevant quest, I guess.
So I went through the Everdoor because my only other options were to spend DAYS of in-game time doing the extremely tedious shit the game had saved for last.
Because I was paddling myself, the trip down the river was silent, which, see above re: impatience, and might have gone over better with me had I not JUST done a mostly-silent trip down the river with Elena like seven minutes earlier.
And then the game was over!
Absolutely no one is reading this, especially not at this point, but I detailed the end of my game in EXCRUCIATING detail to contrast it with what would have happened before all the extra content was introduced:
Bruce and Mickey are now my eighth spirit to leave no matter how you count it. After I see them off, Hades the owl spirit would tell me it was time to go through the Everdoor myself. At that point, I would have had Stanley, Buck, and Elena left. Stanley would be pretty much ready to go, and maybe I'd still keep him around for a while, or maybe I'd just take him through the door because I knew the end was close. Once I took Stanley through the door, I would have noticed the ghosts when I went back to his house for his spirit flower, so that reveal would hit as intended and I wouldn't have been confused and thrown off by Elena's ghost. Buck and Elena would be my only remaining passengers. Buck would have been silent for a while at this point - I'd finished his D&D quests, he wouldn't have any more after that, and I would have been wondering why he wasn't asking me to go through the door. All I would have had left was Elena's tasks. I'd go do those for lack of anything else to complete, and then I'd drop her off when she asked me. When I returned to the boat, I would have gotten the [!] from Buck and gone over to him, and him saying "I can't go through the door" would have made some kind of sense - I would have been wondering, at that point, why he hadn't asked to go through yet.
It would have made sense that it was time. Buck's ending would have been the answer to a question I had been asking, and wouldn't have felt like it yanked the rug out from under me.
Maybe I still would have seen that I had the option to do a bunch of bullshit errands if I felt like it, but it would feel like two separate paths: I could go through the Everdoor, or I could run some errands if I really wanted to prolong the experience, but it would be with the understanding that they were only there so I could prolong the experience.
Maybe that's an idealized way of thinking about it! But triggering the option of the ending after eight spirits makes a certain amount of sense - numbers are getting low on the boat, the player is running out of things to do, and it gets them thinking about the end while they still have time to make that decision. It fits with the theme of the game - you-as-Stella, like all your spirit charges before you, will choose to go through the Everdoor once you feel ready.
Instead, the game now delays that trigger - it doesn't happen after eight spirits, it happens after eight spirits plus however long it takes you to complete Lily's quest line. Adding a spirit at this point inaccurately implies that there is more road left ahead of the player than there actually is.
On top of that, there are the changes to Buck's quests. In the original game, Buck would be inexplicably silent for a while. I would expect him to want to go through the Everdoor, and he wouldn't ask me to take him.
Instead, his treasure hunt quest triggered before I had any idea I was close to the end. Buck had me doing tedious bullshit that, again, inaccurately implied a decent amount of road was left ahead of me, and then suddenly in the midst of that he was like "you might have guessed this already, but I can't go through the Everdoor!" while I wondered why in the flying fuck I ever would have GUESSED that.
Finally, delaying the Everdoor trigger increases the chance that the first ghost discovered will be Elena's, which is confusing as hell.
IDK! Overall it just seems like the original ending was built with the understanding that it made sense to give the player the option of the Everdoor at the 8 mark, because that's around the time they'd start noticing they were about to run out of content. They ease you into the idea that your time in the game is coming to an end. That feels very thematically fitting!
In the new ending, they've added Lily and her accompanying quests, which serves to obscure that the game is winding down, particularly in conjunction with Buck's quests, which obscure the fact that Buck is supposed to...well, buck the trend by not asking to go to the Everdoor when all his quests are complete. There was originally something of a divide between the core game and the completionist extras, so the game was essentially saying "you're done with everything we really wanted you to do, and we can either call it a day OR you can do this bonus stuff," but the addition of all the update content obscures that now, and it all runs together - stuff that is supposed to be a "bonus" for completionists gets mixed in with the core game, and it completely throws off the balance and makes the game feel like it's run out of ideas before you've reached the end. If I had finished Spiritfarer eight months ago, I probably would have enjoyed trying out the Lily stuff* in the spring, and then trying out the Beverly and Buck stuff this month! The new tasks work as add-ons for returning players, but I don't think the devs properly considered how they fuck with the flow of the original game.
*To be clear I feel like I would also hate the Lily STORY in this context, because as I've said, "it was all a coma dream" is an obnoxiously literal explanation for a game that feels like it should not be literal at all. But I can see it being enjoyable to people who were upset because they wanted the Lost finale to answer all their lore questions.
LOOK, ULTIMATELY, I REALLY WANTED TO LIKE THIS GAME, and I struggled a lot with its rough edges but I think I really did get into a groove with it - I mean, I played this thing for OBSCENELY long stretches of time, and that doesn't happen with a game that doesn't have SOMETHING compelling going for it - only to be severely thrown off that groove by the way old and new and base game and postgame all collided at the end. It sucks! I really thought we were going to come in at a 3.5/5 where I could say, like I have with a handful of other games, that I enjoyed it enough to wish it had been better executed. And then the ending happened to me and I just...3/5 somehow felt both cruel and way too high? I was all over the fucking place. This post is closing in on nine thousand words and I STILL feel like I have feelings that need exorcising. I JUST WISH IT HAD LET ME HAVE A BETTER TIME IS ALL!!!!!!!
If you read all of this...I'm sorry, and also why?
Also I just found out that Daffodil the cat is canonically a boy and I reject that.