Okay so I want to talk about this electronic video game because I need to.

So in this game, spiritfarer, you are a girl who takes on the role of boat pilot on the river (waterworld?) styx who boats people to the afterlife, and they take on the form of animals. You help them work through their trauma (or not), and then they move on when they're ready. That's the general idea anyway. 

It starts off and you have these three very good guests, and you're talking with them and helping them do stuff, and then, honestly sort of abruptly, both of them are ready to head on out. 

The game is extremely dense, to the point of being obtuse, with metaphors, some being so out there it's almost impossible to figure out exactly what they mean. 

Lesbian snake grandma, for example, tells you how she has been battling "the dragon" for most of her life. Normally, this would represent some form of addiction, but in this game apparently it turns out its cancer. You only know this if you buy the art book, btw. Or read the wiki. 

Whatever, that's irrelevant. Honestly the main part of this game, IE: taking people to the afterlife, is very moving at times and the tone is super super relaxed. You feed your friends, they go on quests to move on, you take them to the ever gate, they ascend, the end. 

Only, after awhile, that part of the game is totally absolutely superceded by resource management. It sneaks in innocently enough at first. You need to build a garden and upgrade the ship. The snake wants a garden. Okay. So you do that. Upgrade the ship. Then they all start pitching upgrades and buildings. They all need their own house. All need a fully upgraded house. Can't fit it so you need a bigger boat. Can't buy food, have to cook it, so you have to collect food. Have to sail the ship to resource islands to gather things to make things, turn those things into other things, combine them into more things.

What starts as this therapizing mission of solving these peoples' trauma through love and conversation (literally you hug them and show them affection), it just turns into this game of putting numbers into holes. It's so, so frustrating. 

The game works on a clock/day system so that every 20 minutes or so is an in-game day, and there are just timers and notifications going off constantly. The whole vibe of the game turns from this smooth low key gentle thing to TIME TO COLLECT THE COOKING FOOD, THE PLANTS NEED WATERING, THIS GUY WANTS UPGRADES, THIS GUY NEEDS CHICKEN PREPARED A CERTAIN WAY, RUN THE CRUSHER. 

It's a nightmare!!

When you load into the game the first thing you're basically confronted with is a housefire you have to put out for 15 minutes before you can do anything! Everyones hungry and mad and everything has to be watered, touched, hugged, investigated. What the fuck!

I have no idea what they were going for, but it's exhausting. The animal quests, which at first went way too fast, slow down IMMENSELY. To the point where I have some animals with whom I have basically zero relationship to because all their dialogues happen while the game is exploding, literally melting down with tool tips and alert icons. And essentially, you start rushing through their stories because when they pass on they leave you little upgrade tokens that you need to insert into your ship to do the next animals questline. 

The game is a mess. It's a beautiful idea that turns almost into a mobile game full of timers by the end. I strongly reccomend playing the first 2 hours of the game and then uninstalling immediately after. 

Just to show you I'm not being whiny, here's some of the materials you need to collect in ABUNDANCE to play this game about talking to people


Wood: three types. Need both logs, planks and sawdust. All have to be milled yourself and you have to sail to islands to chop it down. 
Food: Literally about 600 recipes. All of it needs to be cooked one at a time, and everyone has extremely different food preferences and they have to eat 1-2 times a day. You got 10 kinds of fish, 5 kinds of lobster, oysters, clams, shrimp. You got chicken, pork, milk, sugar, corn, wheat, oils 50 kinds of vegetables, fruits, etc-- and you have to grow all the food. All the tea leaves all the coffee beans, EVERYTHING has to be cooked and there is LIMITLESS amounts of this shit and half of them need OTHER buildings just to be usable
Fabrics: Cotton, wool, linen, special stuff, other special stuff. All of it has to be grown then you have to go to a tailor shop you make with OTHER materials and put those threads through THREE KINDS OF PRODUCTION
Metals: There's about 20 kinds of metals. They have to be mined, taken back to the ship, refined in a production facility, crushed, mixed, FUCK
Special event resources: Each spirit has its own repetitive event resource that has to be performed numerous times. This can range from digging rocks out of dragons, catching meteors, killing jellyfish, on and on and on and on and they almost all need further refinement and other resources to use correctly, and each time you do the quests they get harder and harder and longer and AUUUUGHHH

Do you see what I mean?? This is presented to you as a game about communication and feelings and by the midpoint its just, shit I need more numbers, I have to go get more numbers. Abandon all the feelings, it's time for numbers gathering.

It's exhausting dude. And it sucks. Underneath all that is a really, really interesting and heartfelt story.