The locations and islands you visit are scattered across a surprisingly wide map, split into different regions with different styles - misty pine forests, industrial cities, agrarian rice farms - and as spirits' requests become more complicated, you have to travel further afield for rarer resources. At certain mood levels, they'll give you valuables to sell, or extra raw materials they've gathered, which is useful given the amount of travelling you have to do to acquire them otherwise. Look at how a sheep reacts when you shear it, for example:Īlthough I said that all your work is carried out for nothing but kindness, making your denizens happy does reap some benefits. The animation and art, in fact, are universally beautiful, and full of charming detail. Astrid, a lynx, always looks surprised for a second, before flopping her big paws down. The hugging is excellent, because everyone hugs you in a slightly different way, with an animation that fits who they are. You can hug them all, and that cheers them up. They will share memories and go through trials, or may ask to be left alone. It is both an intriguing and a satisfying sort of puzzle, trying to work out what things become what other things, ahead of time.Īs you perform tasks for them, your motley crew will make further requests. Similarly, your recipe book is a blank slate, so you have to just try combining a root vegetable with some flour, let's say, and seeing what happens. Each spirit has a list of likes and dislikes, and some even have food allergies, and you can only find all of these things out through trial and error. I made apple pies for her in the kitchen, via a process that required a lot of experimentation. Spiritfarer rewards you for paying attention and trying to be kind, you see, and it turned out that Alice got a permanent mood boost from being near the orchard. So I rearranged my entire boat specifically around her, and because she liked the orchard I made sure it was right near her home. But then one of the other residents told me that Alice was having trouble getting up and down the ladders. Before she came aboard, I had organised my ship's layout as sensibly as possible, with few gaps. Alice was a sweet, elderly hedgehog lady who liked old-fashioned food and apple trees, and asked to go somewhere exciting with me, and therefore reminded me of my own grandmother. Every spirit teaches you how to use one or two of these, and once you've built them you can move everything around, stacking and switching things at your leisure with little clicky-brick noises.Įach spirit is an animal representing the person they truly are. In between them you put other buildings you need for the happy running of a community: gardens for growing veg, a sawmill and foundry for processing the raw materials you find out in the world, a loom for weaving. When a spirit joins your ship you build them somewhere to live, so you end up with a collection of little homes that stack on top of one another. One got me because I was extra kind to them, and the other because I wasn't. When I previewed Spriritfarer I was told by Nicolas Guérin, the lead writer and creative director at developers Thunder Lotus Games, that every player has one spirit whose death really gets to them. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Or at least not for your own material gain. Like Stardew Valley, but where your thousand acts of labour are done entirely for, on the face of it, nothing. It is a cosy management game where you spend most of your time harvesting things to make other things. And for that you must care for sheep, play music to plants to help them grow, mine for coal and learn to smelt silver. Helping a spirit become ready to go involves cooking for them, hugging them, and building them a home on your enormous houseboat. Except, I think it is actually about kindness. You play as Stella, whose job is to take dying spirits through the Everdoor to their final death, when they're ready. It will make you sad, but it even does that in a kind way. Spiritfarer's cosy management is a thousand acts of kindness, beautifully done.
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