[Game: Spiritfarer, Thunder Lotus Games, 2020]

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Spiritfarmer:

Introduction:

In narrative, setting, and artstyle, Stardew Valley and Spiritfarer are very far apart: the former is about rejuvenating a grandparent’s abandoned farm and embracing a rural lifestyle in pixel art; the latter is about coaxing souls onto a boat and ferrying them to their final rest in high-res illustration. But in terms of tone and mechanics, they’re extremely similar. They’re both laid-back 2D indie management sims with farming, ranching, crafting, cooking, fishing, mining, beekeeping, foraging, rigid day-night cycles, base building that involves resource checklists, minigames for basic actions, optional co-op, slow traversal with fast travel nodes, and a cast of quirky NPCs that give quests and offer benefits if you make them happy.

Yet it is a stark fact to me that the implementation of the individual mechanics in that list is done, by and large, far better in Stardew Valley than Spiritfarer. For immediate clarity, I’m not here to point out that Stardew Valley is the more complete and varied experience. It’s true, but it’s also a trite, obvious, and uninteresting observation. Spiritfarer hasn’t received the boundless support and resources which allowed Stardew to steadily expand in features across the past decade. It is (of course) impressive that Stardew Valley, in a manner reminiscent of Terraria, has been subject to so much free expansion since its release. But that’s simply not what this article is about.

The comparison I’m here to make is between the handling of specific mechanical elements in Spiritfarer and the handling of the closest corresponding elements in Stardew. The quantity and variety of such elements in each game will be, for this exercise, ignored. Their aesthetic and narrative differences will also be mostly ignored here. They could swap themes and artwork and I’d be writing the same article. In fact, they could swap practically everything other than the details I’m about to discuss, and a session spent playing Stardew Valley would still be preferable—due to the mechanical functioning of many basic interactions with the gameworld.

Spiritfarer’s Active Task Problem:

Both Stardew Valley and Spiritfarer are relaxed, slow, and intentionally repetitive. Both of them, at their core, involve doing a small number of concrete practical tasks a large number of times, with the productivity or pace of some of those tasks increasing with progress. We can roughly divide the relevant tasks within each game into two groups: passive and active.

Passive tasks can be set and forgotten; after initiating them, they look after themselves until they’re completed a pre-programmed number of actual minutes or seconds later. Aging or fermenting produce is an example of a task that is handled passively in both games. In general, both games get passive tasks right. No complaints here.

Active tasks, on the other hand, only happen as long as the player-character is doing them. Some of these are extremely short, like plucking a single crop in either game; others take longer, such as mining an ore deposit in either game; and still others take a minute or more each, like participating in timed events for special rewards in either game.

The gameplay loop of both titles involves juggling and prioritizing active tasks to pass time in between cycles on the passive tasks, all in service of accumulating resources toward various goals.

Now, the two games don’t categorize every task the same way as each other. For example, refining ore into ingots is a passive task in Stardew Valley but an active task in Spiritfarer. But that’s no concern here. All that matters here is the set of activities which both games put in the active group—because such activities are great in Stardew, but worse and worse the longer you play Spiritfarer.

Let’s compare the act of cutting down a tree in Stardew Valley to the act of cutting down a tree in Spiritfarer. In Stardew Valley, you click on the tree until it falls over. In Spiritfarer, first you click on the tree, then you wait for Daffodil to join Stella (which can take a moment if they’ve gotten separated), then you watch an animation of them joining their everlights into a saw, then you wiggle the saw back and forth until the tree falls over.

Basically, between telling the game you’d like Stella to start cutting the tree, and starting to cut the tree, for some reason there are multiple intervening steps—both of which are mandatory, and one of which takes a variable amount of time. As charming as it is the first time you see Daffodil swell into a weird balloon to fly into place, it’s really never worth the delay again. And I see no reason whatsoever for the cat not to at least be teleported just outside the view window upon initiating an action that requires both characters, so that the process of flying it over would never take more than a couple seconds.

The general problem that this example illustrates is that Spiritfarer pairs mandatory animations, each a few seconds in length, with every step of most of its active tasks. If you want to harvest a crop and plant a new seed in its place in Stardew Valley, that’s a pair of instantaneous actions. If you want to harvest a crop and plant a new seed in its place in Spiritfarer, that’s a matter of watching Stella turn her everlight into a scythe, then hold it aloft, then swing it, then wait a moment for the plot to become active again, then plant the replacement seed.

Now, not every active task needs to be instantaneous. Nor does every active task absolutely require constant player activity. But the vast majority of active tasks should fall into one of those two styles; the middleground of having control in fits and starts every few seconds should be a rarity. But in Spiritfarer it is by no means a rarity. It’s the rule, not the exception. Instead, instantaneous active tasks, like feeding chickens and collecting their eggs, and constant input active tasks, like processing fibers into threads, are the rarity.

Under such circumstances, those little touches become grating, adding friction which builds up into tedium as hours in the game pass by. Each of the animations in question is only about three seconds long . . . but for actions that will be performed almost constantly in-game across hours, that’s still two or three seconds too long. After all, we’re talking about the animations associated with shearing sheep, milking cows, plucking vegetables, harvesting stalks, pulling fruit, watering plants, cooking food, rowing ashore, beginning to fish, chopping trees, and sleeping through the night.

While it would be ideal for most of the relevant animations to eventually become skippable, just offering some means of speeding them up after some point in the campaign would likely be enough of a fix for most of the issues here. The first time Bruce has to manually pull Mickey’s ear so he’s facing Stella before she can talk to them, it’s a likeable bit of polish. The thirtieth time Bruce has to manually pull Mickey’s ear so he’s facing Stella before she can talk to them, it’s a groan-inducing annoyance.

Overdrawing the pickaxe when mining or overheating the hammer in the smithy punishes the player by forcing them to sit through an animation before continuing. You would think, in implementing those systems, the developers might’ve noticed that they were offering the same form of punishment to players for watering their crops, retrieving cooked food, and going to sleep.

Clarifying Spiritfarer’s Problem:

Now, since I’m pretty sure it’s the main response dissatisfied readers will direct at this article, I should clarify that this complaint does not derive from a lack of patience. It’s not about the actions being simply slow.

It’s about their associated animations being frequent, repetitious, non-interactive, sometimes entirely unnecessary, and just slow enough to resemble the passivity of cutscenes. It’s about the inconsistent level of interactivity that results—the additive effect of many little interruptions to living in the gameworld. It introduces undue friction, like installing a padlock on your kitchen pantry. So, for example, the issue isn’t holding down a button to pull an onion; the issue is the three unavoidable seconds of Stella falling on her ass that follows without fail every time (the last second of which is spent standing still after the animation has concluded, for some reason).

For reference, I’m a person that would enthusiastically defend the way that deliberate, slow animations are used in rare or even one-off situations in games like Riven, Obduction, and The Witness to sell the atmosphere and reality of their gameworlds, to emphasize the importance or rewarding nature of certain moments, and to foreground quiet contemplation. But notice that those games overwhelmingly do provide an otherwise consistent and smooth experience, and that even during such slow operations they often do not withhold control of the player-character. What I would not defend and would certainly dislike would be if, say, engaging any of the 500 puzzle panels in The Witness always made you sit through a three-second animation of your player-character attaching a USB mouse to it or something.

Nor is this simply a complaint about repetition. My hundreds of hours in Stardew Valley and Factorio and Terraria (not to mention various roguelikes and classic turn-based RPGs) should make it clear that there is no upper bound to my tolerance for repetition—when the gameplay loop is sound.

Rather, what we’re running into here is the unintuitive but perfectly true sentiment that sometimes a design that increases realism reduces immersion. Prolonged animations and micro-cutscenes, in their momentary removal of control, call attention to the barrier between the player and the game. They take you out of the gameworld, and that’s not something desirable for basic actions occurring a half dozen times in the average minute of gameplay. Lots of games make some missteps in this regard, but games where coping with such missteps takes up a significant portion of the experience, as they do in Spiritfarer, are relatively uncommon.

Conclusion:

As usual, the conclusion is the time to temper my claims somewhat. Spiritfarer‘s a sweet game, and if you’re a player who likes this kind of calm management gameplay and you only play until the third encounter with Hades, the grinding gears of its basic actions are unlikely to significantly grate on you or overstay their welcome in the ways I’m describing here.

And for other players Spiritfarer‘s narrative virtues may outweigh any and all mechanical shortcomings. Now, I have to admit that I haven’t really been emotionally affected by the narrative material in either game, Stardew Valley or Spiritfarer. But if I had to choose which has better writing, it’d be Spiritfarer. As much as I like Linus, Maru, and Leah, the denizens of Stardew are (with just a couple exceptions) fairly one-dimensional when compared to the personalities and backstories you can uncover through investigation or implication with Spiritfarer figures like Gustav, Summer, Stanley, and Bruce & Mickey. And that list does include a couple characters I was a bit sad to see go.

Ultimately, it is a fairly pleasant game. But the reason it isn’t as pleasant—as welcoming, cozy, and comfortable—as A Short Hike or Slime Rancher or Mini Motorways or Stardew Valley has little to do with its thematic focus on death, and everything to do with the specific functioning of its mechanics.

And when zooming out from the primary gameplay, you might notice that there are a number of other decisions in the design of the game that I could generously call . . . bold? For example, I think it was ‘bold’ to make the music for the fast travel sea lion so obnoxious that the game offers the option to mute it forever the first time you hear it. It was also ‘bold’ to have so many of the game’s side quests offer no extrinsic rewards. It was also ‘bold’ to train the player to release the button for fishing when the pole turns red—and then never teach or suggest the fact that catching tuna without the fishing upgrade is only possible by tapping the button, rather than releasing it, when the pole turns red. That last one probably left a lot of players thinking it was impossible without the upgrade.

Such details of the game, like those covered earlier in the article, were certainly all (or almost all) intentional choices by the development team. You might even call them ‘design experiments;’ hence ‘bold’ rather than, well, ‘wrong.’ There are undoubtedly contexts in which those design choices would work; I do genuinely see a lot of potential (in other game concepts) for thankless side quests, incomplete instructions, and even purposefully annoying music. But speaking for myself, these experiments were not successful or effective here.

On a similar note, maybe the developers thought they were enforcing a sense of peace when deciding, for instance, to force the player to watch Stella don her oven mitts every time she needs to remove cooked food from the kitchen. But speaking for myself, since it’s an action I had to do hundreds of times to keep my passengers fed, that’s a design decision that enforced frustration rather than peace. Now, even by the time the last spirit was fared, watching the oven mitts appear only produced a tiny droplet of frustration. And the same could be said, that only a tiny droplet of frustration results, for any other individual animation into which the game locks the player. Unfortunately, across an entire playthrough Spiritfarer acts as something of a rain barrel for such droplets, so there was enough for an article-long chug at the final weigh-in.