Spiritfarer and game exhaustion

Spiritfarer is a wonderful game. It's charming - the artstyle feels hand drawn and light and lively. The characters are emotive and huggable. Your travelling companion is a cat. You grow gardens and weave and cook and herd sheep and plant trees and catch fish. You play music and chop logs and smash rocks and glide around through the air and play with movement physics. I love it, it's a magical first-time experience game.

And I've never finished it.

I purchased Spiritfarer back in August of 2020, and played it for 1 or 2 hours each evening after work for about a month. I took it slow, as I was never the person for these kind of games, and had just gotten done seeing my girlfriend take a break from Animal Crossing for literally the entire month of July after playing it every day for 3 months, so I knew that the grind of playing a game every day could be killer. I stuck to only a couple of hours each evening. In that time with a couple hours each night, I was able to meet and send off Gwen, Summer, and Alice. I took a break from Spiritfarer around October - one evening I simply didn't turn it on like I had every other night for the past month or so, and my planned break of that single evening turned into days, into weeks - into months. I started up once more in January of this year, helping Atul find his Fried Chicken and started planning his dinner party (though he's still waiting for Gustav's Tuna Tataki before we can sit down to eat). I played again for 2 or 3 days before once again putting the game down, and I sadly haven't picked it up since.

Let me state that I do not think Spiritfarer is a bad game, it's just simply not my game. I played Spiritfarer for what I estimate is around 40 hours, and enjoyed it. It was not at all the kind of game I usually play, and frankly I'm surprised I stuck around for so long. I think the reasons I left the game mainly boil down to two things - uncertainty and exhaustion.

Let's touch on what I mean by uncertainty first. The beginning hours of the game are masterfully crafted. You meet Gwen and she takes you through the game's basic tutorial where you discover how things work and what kinds of things you will be expected to remember during your sessions. You learn about movement, arranging the boat, cooking food, spirit food likes and dislikes, spirit skills, and the basic "crafting" system. You meet Summer and learn about gardening and music and where to go when you need to find resources that are usually scarce. You learn more about Gwen as her backstory opens up, and you discover the locations relevant to her past and her journey. You send her off through the Everdoor. Maybe you cry a little.

And then - what now. The tutorial is done, the Spirit whom I've grown the closest too on my boat is now gone, and I'm left with Summer, Atul, Alice, and Astrid. Atul is easier since he will eat anything, but gone are the days where it was acceptable to just rotate between popcorn and coffee - now I need to actually start making food. Oh but, I've only got access to Coffee Beans, Corn, and basic thread, so if I want to start making foods that Summer and Alice will actually enjoy, I need to go find more materials. My first soft wall in the game that I've picked up as a way to de-stress - everyone wants something but nobody will tell me where to find it. I open up the map and no dice - I've visited all of the locations on my map already.

But wait, what about the dark zones on the map? What if I just go off into one of those zones and hope that I'll find the magical city of cabbage and fried chicken? Beats going around looking for crates in the hopes that one of them will have not-coffee-beans.

Looking back, I now realize that this exploration is exactly what I was meant to and expected to do. The game wanted me to venture off into the far unknowns and organically discover new places and new things. I did, and I enjoyed it! But, up until that point for me the destination had been mostly laid out and setup for me, with the only obstacles on the way being making sure I had enough materials, or had shown mastery of the loom and the sawmill. I had never been required to find a new location, but rather had always been gently or forcefully guided towards that outcome. Suddenly with Gwen gone, the game had decided that I had made it to the big leagues after just one Everdoor trip, and now I had to play or go home.

Armed with my new mindset to go wherever until I was stopped by ice or rocks, I eventually succeeded in finding Bruce and Mickey, Giovanni, and Gustav. I also helped see Summer and Alice off through the Everdoor. It was at this point that the game took a major turn for me and I had to put it down for the first time. It was at this point that the game became more of a chore, and the chore became exhausting.

Let me briefly speak on one point where I believe the game - as a game - does fall a little flat. The opening hours are supreme - there is no other feeling quite like picking up Spiritfarer for the first time. But as the game continues on and characters come and go, one thing I began to notice was that as I moved further and further into the game, the characters became less and less engaging. I sympathized with Gwen and was patient enough to wait for Summer and Atul, but my initial reaction to meeting Astrid and Gustav and Bruce were not those of patience. I didn't resonate with these later characters as much, and as a result never actually cracked their hard shells enough to get to the meat of what their stories were. Instead of the game building up more and more of it's wealth of characters and ending with a bang, it was beginning to fizzle out before it had finished. When I left the game, I was in the middle of Astrid and Giovanni's infidelity, and had just gotten done building homes for Gustav and Bruce, and I just couldn't be bothered.

I liked Gwen, really liked her. She had personality, she helped me through the first parts of the game - held my hand so to speak. Normally I'm not for that kind of thing in a game, but in Spiritfarer? In a game which I had hoped would be relaxing and stress free? In a game with wonderful music that allows you to hug all the characters? Heck yes I would want someone to help me along with a light suggestion of, at least, what to do next.

I liked Summer too, though to a lesser degree than Gwen. She and I never quite clicked the same way things were with Gwen. Alice was even less so - though I empathized with her story and how tough it became for her in the end, we never quite hit it off. It seems that I was opening up less and less to the later characters. In a strange way, Spiritfarer had burned me in a way I never thought possible.

I was afraid to become engrossed in these new relationships with my other characters because, after Gwen left, there was a hole that was left unfilled. In both a figurative emotional sense, as one of the characters I had come to enjoy was gone forever, but also in the literal in-game sense - as her house was left on the boat but abandoned, unable to be removed or re-occupied. As the exact opposite of the principal goal of the game, I had not learned to cope with loss, and I had not learned to let go - rather - I had become more fearful of the idea than ever before. If I let go of Gwen, who was my favorite, and was miserable, what would happen when Summer and Alice and Atul left. I'd be stuck with Astrid, and Giovanni, ugh, or even Gustav. Or Stanley.

So progress would damn me, as I would be left with only characters I genuinely would not want to be on a boat with. But a lack of progress would also damn me just the same. Astrid would constantly complain for me to see what Giovanni was up to. Atul would keep asking for Fried Chicken and Pork Chops. My days in the game went from exploration and wonder into the very planned and carefully calculated game of optimally watering plants, picking crops, crushing seeds and rocks, smelting ores, travelling to the next city or event location, and cooking in preparation of whose favorite dish I would be making that evening. Spiritfarer became a stressful experience, just because there was always so much micro-managing to do. And to do it for characters that I wasn't really meshing with didn't help.

Let me put it out there, that I know Stanley had a troubled past for a mushroom-thing, but boy do I despise him as a character. He shows up, basically out of nowhere, and immediately starts demanding resources and consuming space. I was not prepared at all for Stanley. With the other characters, I could at least decide to speak with them once I knew I had space on the boat, or enough food to last a couple nights, but Stanley literally pops out of the ground and then suddenly demands food and takes over my guest house. Not cool Stanley.

This large amount of micro-managing took a once relaxing and genuinely enjoyable game into a chore combined with the fun of optimizing my route around the ship and the arrangement of my buildings for the shortest path with the least button presses. Yeah. That was how I survived what had otherwise become the monotony of watering crops and smashing seeds and cutting logs. Optimizing.

I saw off Gwen in August, Summer in September and Alice in October. I was so burned out that I put the game down in October and didn't pick it up again until January. In January I saw off Atul, and then returned to a ship with Giovanni, Gustav, Astrid, Bruce, and Stanley. I looked at my fields of crops that needed watering, and my sheep that needed trimming and my food that needed cooking. I looked at my characters demanding simple food, but also exotic food, but also nothing with veggies or fruit. I looked at the quest I had to go to a town which was locked behind an ice-walled zone because I didn't have a big enough ship. I needed metals I had never heard of from places I had never been.

I put the game down and haven't picked it up since. I probably will never pick it up again.

I did not dislike Spiritfarer, on the contrary, I loved it and would actually recommend it to people who are more easily swept up in these kinds of micromanage/simulator/farming style games. It's not for me, but it is for somebody. I'm just exhausted and burned out from playing it too much - and if I have to wait for the slow animation of that tiny bird turning that huge bull around before the dialog box pops up one more time - I'm gonna lose it.

Code stuff soon, stay tuned!

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