Yet another seemingly cute game that’s actually grimdark depressing. Maybe we should be concerned that’s become so common? This one is at least up-front about it: You play as someone who guides dying spirits to the afterlife, fulfilling their last requests before you do so. But even knowing what to expect, it was so much more depressing than I was prepared for.
What I expected: Something like the finale of The Good Place, where the spirits would only move on after they were happy and fulfilled and felt they had nothing more to accomplish.
What I got: The opposite of that. The spirits start happy, and then you get to watch them fall apart physically and mentally, slowly sinking into despair as every ounce of joy is squeezed from them, until they give up and commit suicide. (This includes not one but two old ladies whose stories are resolved by saying, “Looks like they’ve got dementia, time to euthanize them,” which was incredibly uncomfortable.)
This is largely because the game’s blurb is a complete lie. You’re not actually a psychopomp, the main character is a hospice nurse and this is all just her dying fantasy as she reflects on the patients she cared for, which is why she can’t actually do anything to help them. So congratulations, those insufferable “What if the happy children’s cartoon was actually a dying dream” theorists are published authors now!
The dishonesty of this infuriates me. If the blurb had been up-front about this being a dying dream, I never would have touched it. It’s bait-and-switching the entire genre. I signed up for a cozy fantasy about helping troubled spirits in the form of cute animal people, not psychoanalyst realistic fiction. The most frustrating thing is that I’m sure there’s an audience for that, even! The designers just deliberately chose to market to a different audience instead, because, I don’t know, they thought it would sell better? I’m so sick of this. If you want to write realistic fiction, just write realistic fiction. That is a thing you can do instead of lying about your story’s premise.
Unfortunately, it’s not even any good in its actual writing, because the characters aren’t developed enough to get attached to, undercutting the game’s entire thesis. Dialogue is so thin on the ground that we barely get to know anyone. Most spirits’ stories consist of exactly one quest that reveals maybe a single facet of their lives if you’re lucky, and then they die. Like, we’re introduced to Astrid as a union leader who pledges to fight for the rights of workers everywhere; I expected her last request to be the overthrow of capitalism, but no, it’s something completely unrelated. Every area I went to I kept trying to talk to Astrid wondering if she had an opinion on any of the NPCs complaining about their jobs, but she never even acknowledges them.
Probably the only character’s story that struck a nerve with me was Alice’s. She is a kindly grandmother who realizes that she’s spent all her life taking care of other people, and so she’s never gotten the chance to do anything for herself. She thinks now is the perfect time to try… and then her body and mind immediately give out on her and she spends the rest of her time too frail to even walk unassisted. That last request is forever unfulfilled. She gets nothing. Even as you walk her to Death’s door, all she talks about are other people, the people who stole her life from her in a million tiny ways.
But that doesn’t make me feel sad. It makes me feel furious. Furious at the world that robbed her of her life. Furious because I know there are millions of real people with the exact same stories. It does not make me feel like death is a friend or a necessary evil, it makes me feel like death is pointlessly and sadistically cruel. If this story was supposed to make me feel at peace with death it accomplished the exact opposite. It reminds me only of what age and death take from us.
Really, what is the point of this? Who is this for? Nurses who aren’t depressed enough by their jobs they want it in their free time too? There’s no catharsis here, nor even any comprehensible point being made. It’s just a pile of misery.
I dropped this game around the first old lady, pretty much for the reasons outlined above. I liked the first couple characters; the gluttonous frog uncle and high-strung deer best friend were cool (even if they, too, fell prey to their journeys being negative). The old lady though, just made me, like, stop and wonder why I was enduring semi-fun platforming and resource collection. The cat, I suppose. There should be more cats like the Spiritfarer one.
In retrospect, the character quality is extremely frontloaded. The first characters, with a direct connection to Stella, are the best ones. I expected them to stick around the longest since their departures would be more emotionally significant and you want to build to that kind of thing, but no, they’re shuffled off the stage almost immediately to be replaced with progressively more boring and unlikable characters. (I suppose Atul does stick around a bit longer, but he also has the most unsatisfying ending.)
I could believe that. I know I can’t fully judge the game’s writing and characters since, like I said, I pretty much stopped playing half(?)-way, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it doesn’t get any better than where I left it. There’s only so much you can do with that premise as executed. Maybe a more uplifting version of the game would be taking place in a halfway house instead of a hospice or something.
Crushed to learn Atul has the worst ending; I’m pretty sure he was still around when I bounced.
You can’t even take Atul to the Everdoor. After you complete his quest, he just disappears and you never see him again. According to the artbook, this is because the real Atul similarly disappeared when Stella was young, and since the game is her dying dream, the spirits are all just pantomiming her experiences instead of actual people.
This has been on my wishlist for while, thank you for telling me the real premise of the game.
As even “spoiler-ly” reviews on game site/youtubers didn’t.
Cripes, I presented this game to a friend because I thought she’d like the false premise! I’m now so glad that she went for Stray instead.