I'M ON A BOAT
Spiritfarer describes itself as "A cozy game about dying" and delivers on both promises with gusto. You play as Stella, a young (and also brown - yay diversity!) woman who has been chosen to act as the next "Spiritfarer," or ferryperson of the dead. You've got a GREAT hat, and a charming cat. You've got to round up various dead folks, feed and shelter them, do a few quests/favors for them, and then finally bring them to the Everdoor at the center of the world map where they can move on. In the process, you spend a lot of time on your boat, and guys, the boat is pretty cool.
Your ship is probably the most customizable element of the game.
The game uses a pretty smooth crafting/building system to allow you to build various structures. Some of those, like your garden, sawmill, or forge, are used to craft various things from other things. Each crafting system has its own minigame, many of which are timing-based. The remaining structures (the ones that aren't for crafting) house your various passengers. Every structure on the ship has a set shape, which you can sort of Tetris together (Tetris is a verb, right?) in a way that allows you to most easily navigate the ship as you go.
ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY
Life is all about the people you meet along the journey, and in Spiritfarer, the afterlife is clearly about the same. Each person you meet mysteriously knows Stella, though she's the only "human" you see in the game. Everybody else appears as either a ghostly sort of hooded shape, or as an anthropomorphized critter. Oh, there's also a mushroom dude. He's a fun guy.
Those passengers, and the other NPCs you meet on various islands in the world, are all surprisingly compelling and well written. They bring their concerns to you as their captain, and you get to know them pretty well as you work your way through the game. By the end of it, I wasn't really ready to say goodbye to some of them; that's the point of the game though. It's a cozy game. About dying. Part of the beauty of Thunder Lotus' creation is that it fully embraces the thorny nuances of losing the people you care about.
Spiritfarer can be downright gorgeous when it wants to be.
Speaking of people you care about, it's worth noting here that Spiritfarer supports a drop-in couch coop feature as well, where a friend can take over control of your little cat buddy. I never tried it (my wife had already beaten the game and was disinterested in joining me in my own playthrough) but I love to see couch coop these days and had to mention it.
SO MUCH TO DO THAT IT MAKES ME TIRED
There's a lot of things to do in Spiritfarar, and after a while I was sort of done with some of them. I'm not a young gamer. I work full time and have various other (not gaming) hobbies. I went into this game expecting a short indie romp, and played it for over 40 hours.
While I mostly loved this game. I did hit a point about 3/4 of the way through where I was feeling overwhelmed by all the various quests I had piled up, but they actually cleared up pretty quickly in retrospect, and overall the pacing was just fine. One pro (or con, perhaps) of the game is that to a large extent, the pacing of the story is up to the player. If you don't pick up new passengers, you won't have as much to do at once. If you pick up lots of passengers, on the other hand, you'll have a whole boat full of people yammering at you to fulfil their every whim. In that sense, it's very respectful of your choices as a player.
Aside from quests, you spend a lot of time crafting things in the game. You grow plants, some (like corn) for cooking, and others (like linen) for crafting. You catch fish. You play music. You smelt things, forge things, ferment things, pulverize things, sew things, and cook. You cook a lot. There are also a bunch of non-crafting mini-games where you do things like catch lightning in a bottle, or soar through the air after glowing aerial jellyfish. It's pretty neat.
Spiritfarer tells a beautiful story, and there aren't enough games out there in the world that set out to do that and execute on it so effectively. My only gripe about the game is that it made me feel a bit old; at some points I found myself annoyed that I would have to sail back across the map again to go and deliver something to somebody. Again.
The written dialogue in this game is a thing to behold.
Even that gripe though isn't actually too critical. Those moments are fleeting, and while they do represent a sort of annoying "fetch quest" system of gameplay, they also do nothing to detract from the minute-to-minute gameplay the way that problematically-executed fetch quests sometimes can. They're all good fetch quests... there are just a lot of them. It's not a bad problem to have, all things considered.
Spiritfarer made me cry. A couple times. The writing and the art are both brilliant, and they attack your heartstrings with a passion. If you're looking for a cozy game that makes you cry sometimes while also making you feel better about humanity, this is it. You can hug your crew. I give it 9 tearful goodbyes out of ten. Happy sailing, through this life and whatever comes after.