Fetch quests are often considered to be a bane of videogaming. Something that was required back in the early days, now implemented in nearly eye-rolling ways. If you've ever had to "kill 5 ants before we can give you our help" or heard someone complain about such a thing, you effectively understand the fetch quest.
Yet, Spiritfarer does a pretty admirable job of hiding the fact that it is one massive fetch quest, with nested fetch quests inside.
The plot is pretty simple: you take over the role of a modern day Charon, ferrying the dead around an ocean purgatory, until they feel it's time to move on. The characters you pick up need food and have specific dietary requirements-so you need to get food. They need places to live-so you need to get materials to build them homes, and they get depressed when they have drab homes, so finding furnishings becomes important-which of course needs other kinds of material to make.
But the plot is compelling because the characters in the first half of the game are interesting and well developed. Some even have relationships with each other that require other kinds of (fetch) quests that you help with.
However.
The map isn't very helpful, failing to mark the places you've visited with names. That becomes a problem when you need "10 aluminum ores" to build a house for a frog, and they give you a name of an island to visit but you don't remember where it is.
This happens frequently and as the game expands its borders, places become more and more difficult to track. When I was in need of items to move into the next area, I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out where to go next and the relaxing process of growing food, talking to passengers, and catching fish turned into a timesuck, which would involve me looking up things online so I could find what I needed to move on.
The other real bummer about Spiritfarer is that about halfway through the game, the characters and minigames become very thin. I didn't want to engage with the characters-who were constantly demanding food, even if they weren't hungry, with nothing else to say. Previous characters talked about their past lives, or their relationship to the main character-that all dried up. Worse, the new minigames became dull button mashing exercises that felt grindy and unfun, to progress.
And I noticed this because of the need to build an Orchard.
Because most buildings in Spiritfarer are either upgradable (so you can get more out of them) or unique, like someone's dwelling. The game doesn't tell you you can't build multiple fields to grow onions, but it doesn't tell you you should, either.
So when I built and filled my orchard, and needed to plant new trees in it, I searched all over, trying to figure out how to expand the orchard with an upgrade. No luck. Then I saw someone online say: I just built another one.
Oh.
By then, though, I'd had enough of grumpy, unpleasant passengers who didn't have any depth, and minigames that didn't engage any sense of timing or finesse. The game killed its own momentum by going on longer than it should have, or by not giving me important information for me to interact with it in a positive way.
Which sucks, because Spiritfarer is about something really neat: the people you ferry around are people you knew, but don't remember. So there's a process of re-connecting to your past that I thought was quite engaging! At least when it was working.
Then it stopped, which is too bad, because the game was doing something different and cool.
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