Learning to say goodbye
Spiritfarer
When you're a kid, the idea of "being a grown-up" is weird and foggy. Of course it is - adults are worrying about a hundred different things all the time, while the biggest concerns of the average child all have to do with taking Warrior Cats forums way too seriously. (At least, that's how it was for me.) As a kid, my concept of adulthood was basically limited to these things: paying taxes, doing laundry, and yelling at other cars on the road.
Obviously, and as I've since learned, there's a lot more to it than that. Being an adult entails doing and understanding a myriad of different things, but one of the main lessons that comes with Growing Up is learning how to say goodbye.
The first time you say goodbye to someone you're used to seeing regularly and realize you don't know when you're going to see them again, it feels very grown up. It also feels bad. Maybe being an adult means adapting to change all the time, and moving forward sometimes means moving away, but it still sucks.
Spiritfarer is a game about saying goodbye. As Stella, the Spiritfarer, your job is to ferry the spirits of dead characters around. You perform tasks for them, and eventually, when they're ready to leave, you send them through a gateway called the Everdoor. As you play through the game, you become intimately familiar with each character - their likes, their dislikes, their desires, their insecurities. The whole "sending them away" thing starts to take a backseat to the sheer amount of things to do. The methodical chores are soothing in their repetition, but it also feels like there's never room to breathe. You're always doing something, whether it's hopping on a dragon's back to mine quartz or sailing across the world to pick a bouquet of roses.
Gwen, the first spirit you welcome onto your ship, takes the form of a six-eared deer. In life, she was like an older sister to you. She staunchly refuses to eat anything containing shellfish or fruit. She loves black coffee and popcorn. She smokes constantly. She died of lung cancer. She likes using the loom. She resents her father.
The thing about a management game like Spiritfarer is that, in the haze of busywork, even characters can turn into chores. Gwen is a demanding character. For the first several hours of the game, I regularly grew coffee beans for her, avoided making dishes with shellfish in them, and spent resources upgrading her house to the fullest. I got used to her. Then she said she was ready to go.
Spiritfarer doesn't force you to go ahead immediately if you don't want to. If you like, you can keep a spirit around long after they say they're ready to leave. There's no shortage of things to do - but eventually, if you want to explore new frontiers, you have to start saying goodbye.
As you slowly paddle Gwen away from the ship, she talks about her life, her choices, her regrets. No matter the time of day, the Everdoor is always bright. Petals drift by and come to rest on the surface of the ruby red lake. In such a busy game, these moments stand out. Spiritfarer doesn't advance the scene based on how fast you advance the dialogue. There are pauses between stretches of text as you slowly approach the Everdoor, like the game is finally giving you room to breathe.
I watched the boat drift across the water and was struck by the realization that these were really going to be my last moments with Gwen. Suddenly there was magic in the stillness. I'd spent so much time rushing through the game, impatient to fulfill every task, but now there wasn't enough time at all.
Games don't observe the same rules of time that we do. If you wanted, you could make a moment last forever. You could get to a point, close the game, and never go forward at all. And yet, because we are human, and because there's only one way to go, we want to go forward. So we do.
There's no fanfare after a spirit leaves, but for the rest of the game, you can't forget them. Much like how we incorporate other people into our lives, you build routines around the characters in Spiritfarer and never quite undo them. Saying goodbye to someone doesn't mean they stop being a part of your life, after all. You grow coffee beans every so often even though you don't need to anymore, and think about how, once upon a time, it made someone happy.
