Spiritfarer does make admirable attempts to mix this sameness up though. Over time it results in a feeling it's an awful lot like much padding and busy-work. Animation too is beautiful, but even that can feel long winded when repeating the same tasks later into the adventure. Characters have status sheets that, if understood, serve no tangible gameplay purpose, but perhaps do help to build a connection with said character. There's just no real incentive there to do it beyond crafting story specific items. The system creates an illusion of working towards something, but is really just an activity to do between getting from A to B. This feeling is also evidenced through a redundancy to the crafting system, which is presented as the main backbone for gameplay outside of story, offering many options, but actually serving little other purpose than to bottleneck progression. So, whereby the dialogue is no doubt engaging and intelligently written throughout, there are also times where it feels like it can go on for too long, and be somewhat overindulgent. It makes great efforts, and is often successful, in creating the feeling of a grand experience, but then digging down deeper into it and there is never quite enough to back up that initial promise. This is one example that highlights what is Spiritfarer's defining strength, but also its biggest weakness too. Partially this is the point of Spiritfarer, but a large portion of the gameplay can consist of reading text boxes and that can often feel like too much. Spiritfarer counterbalances this somewhat by the desire to find out what animal the next spirit will materialise as, discovering their story afresh, and it's just enough of a hook to keep momentum up for the next loop and the one after that.Įvery character does have something to say, and a lot to say of it. It's an emotional heft that many bigger budget offerings have sought after, and struggled to achieve as effectively - though each passing can feel like a final conclusion and sap the motivation to keep playing on. It has a genuine weight to it, which is really impressive for a title featuring a lot of 2D cartoon animals - even if many anthropomorphic theological quandaries persist within this world. It is a ruminative moment when each stray spirit is eventually ready to let go of whatever it is that they need to let go of, and say their final goodbyes. There is a compelling and empathetic timbre when learning each character's backstory throughout this loop. Or should it be described as a death-sim, perhaps? This is essentially all a patina for an extremely light, resource management life-sim. Getting them there involves a loop of completing fetch-quests, or collecting resources to meet crafting criteria that methodically progress these relationships and the story, forward. She will visit various island locales along the way, and invest in each of her passenger's individual stories, before they are delivered to a thing called the Everdoor a portal to their final resting place. What Spiritfarer really gets right is that sense of a call to adventure, and a wonderment that is set up in the opening moments, and then is carried through to the rest of Stella's voyage. However, this beginning stands as a rousing and cinematic call to adventure that hints towards a deeper substance, one that is chock full of personality, and is probably going to do things a little bit differently from the standard fare-r. It's an unusually to-the-point introduction for a title that, otherwise, can be a bit more of a verbose and a slower-paced affair. It is described in the opening moments, via a literal passing of the torch, called the 'Everlight,' to protagonist Stella the titular Spiritfarer is the one that is tasked with ferrying stray spirits through the afterlife to their final resting place. "Oh, that sounds a lot better than Waterworld." Yes, fellow imaginary reader. "A bit like Waterworld, maybe?" Yeah, if Waterworld was full of always hungry spirit animals, and Kevin Costner spent most of his time fishing, shearing sheep, smelting metal, and the like. They spend a lot of time boating on a vast, seemingly endless sea.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |