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.
Spiritfarmer: