In these times, developers of high-budget projects are often afraid to take risks and experiment with genres, trying to stay closer to proven trends and the most profitable solutions from a commercial point of view. In such conditions, almost all original games that go beyond the generally accepted trends are created by independent studios, and often, unfortunately, are simply ignored by the potential audience. Spiritfarer from Canadians from Thunder Lotus Games (the company is both a developer and a publisher) is one of those rare cases when a game cannot be tailored to a certain category or direction.
The main character, the cheerful girl Stella, and her faithful cat named Narcissus find themselves in the place of the ancient Greek carrier of souls Charon, receiving at the disposal of his superpowers and a ship with the help of which the souls of the dead are transported across the Styx River to the Eternal Gate leading to the afterlife. Despite the very gloomy plot, Spiritfarer surprises with its non-trivial approach. The human relationship to death is an extremely complex topic, and the authors treated it wisely, creating their own eclectic world, built at the intersection of different cultures and worldviews. Most often, death is perceived as a tragedy, and its constant companions are grief and sadness, but in Spiritfarer we do not find anything like it.
The atmosphere of the game adjusts to a light, lyrical mood, and a pleasant hand-drawn visual style, in which soft pastel colors prevail, as well as delicate pink and blue colors, in some way even relaxes. In conjunction with the graphics, the soundtrack convincingly works, consisting mainly of calm, melodic compositions, as if conveying the breath of nature itself – the breath of the wind, the sound of waves, the rustle of leaves.
Spiritfarer combines the features of many spiritual cultures – there is a place for animalism, sometimes there are associations with both Buddhism and ancient motives, travel along rivers to the afterlife. At the same time, the calm, even somewhat complacent acceptance of the inevitable death, the transition of the soul to another world, as well as the confessional manner of presenting the story of each of the heroes correspond to Christian teaching.
If we try to describe the project in a nutshell, then we have a game in a two-dimensional perspective, combining the genre of platforming, life simulator and economic strategy. Spiritfarer can be described for a long time in terms of gameplay, talking about how the mechanics work, but it is unlikely that it will succeed in conveying a feeling of strange peace and a mood of mild melancholy. For most of the game, you need to deal with everyday household chores, such as cooking food, accumulating all kinds of resources, building improvements for the ship, but the main emphasis is still on communication and interaction with the characters.
