Eventually, I realized that I could just plant stuff when I needed a certain veggie or make ingots when they were asked for, which turned those tasks back into amusing asides instead of constant chores. And while you can play that way, Spiritfarer doesn’t actually demand a fast pace, and doing so turns mundane tasks like melting ore to ingots and watering plants repetitive fast. There’s an impulse toward maximum efficiency – having every station working on a thing at all times processing all your raw materials as soon as you get them always making sure you’ve got seeds in your garden and a literal bun in the oven. In fact, all throughout Spiritfarer, I found myself having to unlearn habits games like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing have drilled into me. As long as I was exploring (which I wanted to do anyway) I could generally find what I needed swiftly enough. The progression of finding one type of material to make a thing needed for an upgrade that lets you find the next tier of material is a bog-standard affair, but I did appreciate how little “grinding” Spiritfarer asked of me. There are also buildable crafting stations that turn raw materials like wood and ore found on islands into usable items through simple but cute button-timing minigames – like a loom that lets you turn different fibres into thread, and then thread into fabric. As a result, it’s a fun challenge to juggle and weave these jobs together efficiently, but never one that felt punishing. Spiritfarer’s day-night cycle always made it feel like I had more to do than time to do it all in, but there was little penalty to going slow beyond missing my self-imposed deadlines. You could spend your travel time fishing off the aft and then experimenting with your catches in the kitchen to discover recipes, chatting with your spirit friends to learn more about them, building structures to make new resources available (like an orchard to grow fruit trees), and plenty more. Spirits could ask you to build them a house, collect certain items, or visit specific islands, but you get to decide which of their quest lines to prioritize. Once you’ve set a destination, your ship will automatically chug along to it, leaving you with plenty of time to kill and a boatload of tasks to do. Controlling your boat is as simple as picking a spot on the sea chart, the vast majority of which starts tantalizingly hidden. That task will take you to beautiful villages full of rice fields, snowy lighthouses, and even bustling spirit cities as you collect resources and upgrade your ship in ways that let you explore more of Spiritfarer’s expansive map. You play as Stella (accompanied by her adorable cat Daffodil, who can optionally be controlled by another player in local co-op), who must take over as the new Spiritfarer: a mythological ferrymaster who sails an ocean full of fantastical islands in search of spirits to house and, eventually, bring to their final rest at the Everdoor.
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