Guide friendly spirits into the afterlife in this T-rated management game.
Spiritfarer is a story-driven management game that places players in the role of a girl named Stella, who becomes the Spiritfarer, or “ferrymaster to the deceased.” You’ll need to help Stella travel throughout the in-game world and complete the final requests of friendly spirits before helping them reach the afterlife.
In Spirtifarer, you’ll travel the world in a large boat that you can customize with a variety of buildings, like a kitchen, garden, and field where you can grow seeds. You’ll need to collect the right materials to construct each area, and you can gather these items by visiting different islands, chopping down trees, mining for resources, and completing other activities. You can also go fishing from the back of your boat, cook food, explore islands through platforming gameplay, and more.
You can play Spiritfarer on your own or team up with another person through cooperative local multiplayer (that is, both players are in the same room). When two people are playing, one player controls Stella, while the other controls Daffodil, Stella’s cat.
While Spiritfarer is a game about death, on the Xbox website, the game’s developer, Thunder Lotus Games, said it’s also about celebrating life. As you meet and help spirits, you’ll get to learn their likes, dislikes, give them hugs, feed them their favorite meals, and more. On the Xbox website, Thunder Lotus’ founder, Will Dubé, said these spirits’ “stories were often inspired by loved ones of the devs on our team.”
Spiritfarer is available for $29.99 on Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It’s also available on Xbox Game Pass. Spiritfarer is rated T for Teen by the ESRB, with Content Descriptors for Language,” “Use of Tobacco,” and “Violent References.”
While Spiritfarer may not be appropriate for younger players, we appreciate the game’s potential to be used as a conversation starter with teens about its themes of loss and death.
Check out the first 45 minutes of Spiritfarer in our gameplay video below. Please note that the video does contain a few instances of adult language.
Brandy Berthelson has been writing about video games and technology since 2006, with her work appearing on sites including AOL Games, Digital Spy, and Adweek. When she’s not gaming, Brandy enjoys crafting, baking, and traveling with her husband.
