Game Stories 2.20.25: Spiritfarer-The Unknowableness of Death

The happy little boat management game that will also make you cry.

This is going to be a very different post from what it would have been if I'd written it a week ago, I think.

I knew I would want to write a longer post about Spiritfarer when I got around to doing the Tunesday post for the soundtrack [Check it out here], and I already had both Substack drafts named and dated back in the first few days of February. I planned for it to be a simple summary of the game and the things I've enjoyed about it. Nothing too in-depth.

Then, the morning I planned to sit down and play the game, to get a refresher on the things that drew me to the game in the first place, we got news that a beloved member of our church family had passed away. It wasn't unexpected -- he was almost 90, and spent the past year fighting health issues with the sort of stubbornness that New England seems to breed in its residents, but had been going downhill recently. However, it has certainly colored the way I've thought through the game, and has pulled me out of the "Do the silly sidequests! Listen to the pretty music! Look at the pretty game art" mode that I can sometimes fall into when I get distracted from the main point of the game.

But before I get too far ahead of myself...

What is Spiritfarer?

Introductory Notes:

• Plot-notes are from the first hour or so of play. I’ll avoid spoilers beyond that

• I would recommend looking up content warnings for the game if there are topics you find triggering. Yes, the artwork and music are lovely, and the genre is “cozy”. But, when it comes down to it, this is a game about processing death in many forms, and while most of the triggering aspects are “off-screen”, the depth of some of the characters makes some of the topics hit hard.

Spiritfarer, by Thunder Lotus games, is a cozy boat management sim. However, this is no ordinary boat.

You play as Stella, who, at the start of the game wakes up in a little boat with her cat, Daffodil, to find Charon (of the River Styx fame) there waiting for her. Not to guide her through the underworld, but to hand off the mantle of ferrymaster to the dead before he goes through the Everdoor himself.

He tasks Stella with gathering the stray spirits stranded on the surrounding islands, and bringing them to the Everdoor so that they, too, can move on. But first, she must help them fulfil their last requests.

As he departs, he directs her to a nearby island, where she finds her first stray spirit, her childhood friend Gwen.

Gwen comes across as confident and practical as she shows Stella the ropes, teaching how the game’s basic travel and crafting mechanics work while also explaining a little more about the role of the Spiritfarer in the game-world. She seems, in every respect, the local expert. Their conversation quickly gives the sense that Gwen has been a sort of older sister figure to Stella during her lifetime, and that the role has carried over to this after, when she helps Stella get her sea-legs as the Spiritfarer.

As Stella and Gwen find more stray spirits, and we see more conversation between the two old friends, we pretty quickly begin to see shadows in Gwen’s story. A dysfunctional upbringing. References to difficulties with her father.

Anything too far past that gets into spoiler territory, but the game does an excellent job of introducing each of the spirit characters, expanding realistically from surface-level introductions into more in-depth relationships as we learn more about their backstories. As Stella helps them complete the tasks they feel must be done before they can move on, we learn more about who these characters were and are, and boy, do some of them pack a punch.

Would we still rage against the dying of the light if we could find our way in the dark?

• Note: While I find its musings on how we process death interesting and sometimes helpful, there’s a good deal of Spiritfarer that doesn’t sit well with my personal worldview. Which is all well and good. I’m glad to enjoy good art created by people approaching things from other perspectives. But it does mean that I’m intentionally approaching the following from a more general viewpoint instead of derailing the intentions of the game with my personal beliefs.

Spiritfarer does a beautiful job of portraying the universal human tendency to search for comfort and help in the unknowns of and the lack of control over death. But it’s certainly not the first creative work to try to address how we process death and what comes after, or that expresses the wish to communicate with those who’ve gone ahead or who’ve been left behind.

After all, don't most cultural myths start out by with two big questions: "How did we get here?" and "What happens next?"

Death is one of the great unknowns that humans in every culture have always faced. And like most of these great unknowns, the majority of cultures have filed it under the dominion of some greater power. We assign a supernatural being to it because it’s something we can't wrap our minds around.

We know we don't have any sort of control over what comes next, so we develop rituals and myths and deities to hold the fears of what we can't control for us.

As I was thinking over how widespread this concept is, I was tempted to include a list of death deities in this post, but it quickly became obvious that there were far too many to list, and picking some at random for a condensed list seemed to miss the point of proving how universal the concept is.

Even narrowing our scope a little to talk just about our spirit farers ("That's the name of the game!"), I realized that the myth of a spirit or subdeity of some sort who escorts souls to whatever comes next also spreads far wider than I’d realized. It's a widespread-enough concept that the Greeks decided they needed a specific word for these soul guides: psychopomps - "Guides of souls". These creatures or beings aren't death gods themselves, and aren't responsible for judging souls. They are simply guides, meant to direct the soul on those first initial steps beyond.

I think it's incredibly telling about how much humanity fears the unknown by how widespread the myth of the psychopomp is. It takes the universal tendency to stare into darkness ahead and go "No. There has to be something out there to help us along. There just has to be." And creates a whole mythological subcategory to hold that fear of the unknown for us. "It's alright that I don't know what's coming, because someone will be there to guide me." It places the burden of the unknown on the psychopomp because we are too overwhelmed by the idea to hold it ourselves.

Equally interesting is how many of these psychopomps or comparable deities, from our familiar Charon (Greek myths) to Wuluwaid (Aboriginal Yolngu myths) to Amokye (Akan and Nice myths in Ghana) to the psychopomps of the Vaitarani River (Hindu myths) to Datsue-ba and Keneō (Buddhist myths) to Mama Guayen (Ilonggo myths, Philippines ), among many others have a concept of ferrying souls through or preparing souls to cross some body of water (usually a river) to the land of the dead.

Note: If anything here looks incorrect, please let me know. It is not an area of my expertise, and while I put a couple days of research into it to get details correct for a quick survey, I know not all internet sources are exactly created equal, and that some of those sources may be less than reliable after translation through a Western lens.

This raises the question of what it is about rivers that humanity seems to almost-universally associate with “the final crossing” into death. And while any formal study on that is beyond the scope of my little Substack, random speculation isn’t.

After all, what better than a river to represent an unknowable force of nature that pulls all who enter it away into somewhere, never to be seen again? Or to display the visceral-ness of the unworthy or incautious falling overboard to be swept away into oblivion?

We may have a vague sense of what’s on the other side, but can we really see it all that clearly? Others have gone before and must be waiting there somewhere. Right?

Do we really know until we make the crossing? Will we be ready when the time comes?

If not, who is going to help us along the way?

The ferryman of the river of death may seem like grim company for a final journey, but it’s no wonder the myth has the universal representation it does. All humanity fears the darkness beyond the things we can know.

But if there’s something worse than facing that unknown beyond this life, it’s facing it alone.

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