Underneath my yellow skin

What makes a game great (to me)

In yesterday’s post, I was talking about my two top five (six) list of games. One is my list of the FromSoft games and the other is my list of my five favorite other games of all time. I have to do it because otherwise my top five fave list would just be From games. I don’t have a problem with that, but it’s not respresentative of my interests over all.

What do I mean by that? I mean that while I adore the From games, I also really like indie games for very different reasons. I’ll be real. I don’t get that deep in my feels while playing From games. Don’t get me wrong. There are feelings there. Liking wanting to bonk this character or that. I kid, but I am also not kidding. There are many tragic stories in the games, and they are involved and in-depth. Layered, even. I have had feelings while experiencing the different NPC questlines, sure, but…

Is this heresy to say? It might be, but I don’t care. I’m just keeping it real.

In playing games, I have not gotten as deep in my feels as I did while playing at least three of the games on my non-From list. Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall); Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games); and, Cozy Grove (Spry Fox). They are all special in different ways, but they have a thread that runs through all of them. Death.

I played the three games before my medical crisis (and some Cozy Grove after), and now, they mean so much more since I died (twice!). I have a completely different lens through which I look at life, and these games have stayed with me. I talked about Night in the Woods in yesterday’s post, and today, I want to talk about Spiritfarer.

What can I say about this game? First, it’s made by a dev that I had tried one of their prior games (or both. I can’t quite remember. Sundered and Jotun), and I did not like either. They have a new game that is played by up to 33(!) players at the same time–which is also so much not my jam. Howevwer, when I saw the trailer for Spiritfarer (which I’ll include below), I knew immediately that it was something special. The environments were hand-drawn, rich in color, and just so lovely. The music suited the game, being simultaneously ethereal and haunting,  and the characters were rich and complex.

I will say that I didn’t realize it was actually tagged as a platformer because that’s such a minor aspect of the game, and it’s the part I least-enjoyed. I won’t get into that, but the platforming at the end almost made me quit the game.

Anyway, the main character is a silent protagonist named Stella who is the titular spiritfarer. Her job is to take people to the Everdoor at the end of their lives.  As the player, I had to build up the boat on which I spent a lot of time making things. There’s a lot of plant growing, cooking, and other such activities on the boat.



Whenever I hit land, there was a bunch of things to do, too. Gathering resources, talking to people, and just cavorting around town. Oh, and you get to have a cat, Daffodil, who accompanies you as you go. He will help you out with some of the chores, too. And you can change his looks later in the game as you unlock different ‘outfits’ for him. I made him all black, of course, as soon as I could.

Yes, the tagline is ‘a cozy management game about dying’, but I didn’t realize how deep it was going to get.

I still can’t talk about it without tearing up. Gwen is a deer who I meet fairly early in the game. She’s hard-bitten, existing on coffee and cigarettes, and someone I’ve known all my life. Her family is rich, but her father was abusive. She mentions that to me, and I feel a flash of empathy so deep, it shakes me.

There comes a point when she’s ready to be taken to the Everdoor. Which is my job. Except.

I can’t do it. I just can’t. I love her so much, I’m not ready to let her go. I take a few others, but I can’t take her. It nags at me, though, because she’s so ready to go. I finally take her, and I cry buckets as she takes her final journey.

One thing I appreciate about the game is that the characters are not one-dimensional, nor are they all likable. There are a few that I can’t stand, but I still feel somber and sad when I take them to the Everdoor. Why? Because even though they are not likable, they still have humanity, and I ache for them.

This is the best thing about the game to me–the characters are realistic. They are not either angels or devils, which is how real people are. There is one in the DLC who was a brash, quick-to-anger, braggadocious jerk, but there was something about him that still touched me.

Cozy Grove, on the other hand, had many of the same themes as Spiritfarer, and yet. It’s cuter and not as heartwrenching for whatever reason. One thing I liked about this game was that it played in real time. Meaning that every day in the game was a day in real life. There were daily tasks you could do, but those only changed once a day.

Plus, there are seasons that mostly map onto the real seasons, and the resources change with the different seasons. This got frustrating when I tried to get the plat because the things I needed were in different seasons. Or I had to get percentages that took f-o-r-e-v-e-r to get. It wasn’t fun in the least.

Side rant: I really hate that about plats. I don’t chase after them for the most part because they are so fucking tedious. Elden Ring was by far the easiest of the FromSoft games, and i thin kit’s because it’s the most commercial (and not saying it in a bad way).

That’s it for today. I will actually get to my game of the year tomorrow–probably.

 

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