At the start of the game, Stella has few skills or abilities, and her ship is empty of attractions. Ideally, the emotions of those real-life losses translate to the game in a way players can feel.Īnd that notion of a life beyond death - not in an afterlife, but in the lives of others - also sees powerful reinforcement in the game's mechanics. Gauthier said all the spirits in the game were based on real people who members of Thunder Lotus had lost, already a form of memorializing and making permanent those who pass on. "We wanted to make sure that we didn’t portray the death of someone as the end of that person as an idea, and as an entity in the other people’s lives." Instead, all that they've taught or shared with others lives on in those people. "We’re all faced with that inevitability at some point.” But people don't vanish completely when they die. "Everybody’s lost someone, and everybody’s mortal," said Gauthier. The colors are warm and bright, the world is aswirl with soft light, and characters move with a smooth fullness of motion that catches the eye and holds it.īut that bright aesthetic belies a nuanced exploration on the process of dying. Instead, as in the film, Spiritfarer uses its beautiful visuals to balance out the potential darkness of its subject. Taking inspiration from Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece "Spirited Away," the team started building out a world of warm invitation that didn't sugarcoat or shy away from its subject matter. "Death can be just another step."įishing is one of many activities players will perform as they travel Spiritfarer's warm world. "Death doesn’t have to be scary," art director Jo-Annie Gauthier told me. When the team was trying to figure out what to make next, they realized that death had become a throughline in their work, but that there was room for a fresh perspective on the ultimate end. Thunder Lotus is known for Jotun and Sundered, two solemn, perhaps even dark, games about what it means to die. Several spirits live on the ship at any moment, and it's the player's job not just to take them to their rest, but to keep them content and comfortable along the way. Although the game takes inspiration from the Greek myth of Charon, the ferryman of the River Styx, Stella has swapped out the lonely canoe for a great galleon. Spiritfarer places players in the role of Stella, a young girl who has taken on the task of ferrying spirits from this life to the next. The upcoming management adventure from Thunder Lotus Games wears its heart on its sleeve, and that sleeve is soft, colorful, and comforting as a favorite blanket. Death has never looked so cute as it does in Spiritfarer.
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