Spiritfarer (PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One)
by Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb. – Phil Elverum
“Oh shit, I died.” Once a pretty simple mechanic to keep people pumping quarters into arcade machines, the ubiquity of video game death now defines entire franchises and genres. But for all the virtual death out there, there’s nothing quite like Spiritfarer, a bright, sunny maritime resource-management game that takes place entirely in the world of the dead: Virgil-meets-Animal Crossing, and it’s your job to help the spirits move on to the next stage of the afterlife. You play as Stella, a sprightly avatar in a super cool hat, and her cat Daffodil. Upon entering the spirit realm, you find that Charon the ferryman is retiring and you have been selected as his replacement. Charon gives you the Everlight, an infinitely malleable ball of energy that you use for sawing and weaving and fishing and cooking and playing the guitar, among other things.
Spiritfarer is a resource-management game with some 2-D platforming elements. Once I picked up a few passengers, the gameplay got a little on-the-nose for my pandemic life at home with a six-year-old: “Okay, I’ve got to cook the pork chops for Uncle Atul, water the coffee beans for Gwen, remember to saw the planks for Summer’s cabin upgrade, go fishing to get stuff I can sell to make a bigger boat…WAAAAH the pork chops are burning!” But the resource-management economy can be fun, too. The customizable upgrades that allow you to do things like plane your chopped wood into boards also become your own unique 2-D platforming habitat for minigames where you pop glowing jellyfish and catch lightning for money. This whimsical economy is a nice touch in a genre that tends to uncritically package capitalism as entertainment.
When you finally beat That One Level in Super Mario World (whichever it is for you), or you get past the Hellkite Wyvern for the first time in Dark Souls, there’s a sense that death itself has been conquered, that you’ve successfully overcome something that held you back. There’s certainly a place in video games for this kind of fantasy, but it’s not in Spiritfarer. Spiritfarer is a game about acceptance: You help your passengers accept that they are ready to cross over, and you accept for yourself that these little avatars you’ve grown accustomed to caring for are leaving you forever. All the farming and smelting and sheep-shearing is in the service of giving your passengers the things they need before they can, well, embrace the finality of death, leaving you with your memories of them in those special cabins you built. It’s a dazzling and colorful game about melancholy, the emotional cavern that yawns open inside when things irreplaceably disappear.
I can still visit the Animal Crossing town that I built in 2006. Even though my character hasn’t died, my mailbox will be filled with letters from little animals telling me they’ve left my town forever. As a grownass man in 2020, I will still feel inexplicably sad. Spiritfarer makes me feel that poignancy again, and it also lets me indulge the fantasy that all problems of resource scarcity can be solved by fishing. Phil Elverum from the band Mount Eerie is right when he sings that Real Death is an emptiness that you don’t really make art about. But that melancholic grasp at infinity—that feeling that the world is slipping from your hands and you are trapped on an island of stasis while time’s careless torrent leaves you behind—Spiritfarer has a thing or two to say about that.
