In it, you play Stella, a ferry master who takes over when Charon retires. She is tasked with helping spirits make their way to the underworld.
Throughout the game, you pick up spirits, get to know their stories, and manage an ever-expanding ferry. Along the way, you explore numerous islands, collect supplies, and play mini-games.
This was a game Vuk and I both really wanted to love. The previews made it look like a casual but heartwarming game about death and letting go. We went into it expecting it to combine the sweetness of casual gaming with bittersweet stories that would really make our hearts ache.
Unfortunately, Spiritfarer failed to deliver those heart-tugging moments we were hoping for.
A Charming Facade
Vuk and I were initially attracted to Spiritfarer because of its gorgeous, hand-drawn 2D art style. And during our playthrough, the aesthetic appeal of the game continued to hold our attention.
Adorbable
I loved the fact that the artist chose to use soft pastel hues against the backdrop of death that came with this game. And when we would sail through storms and darkness would encroach, the contrast was stark, giving those moments a real gravitas. Effects, like lightning bolts striking the deck, were simple but effective, and added to the allure.
The music of Spiritfarer was equally appealing and served to highlight the overall ambiance of the game.
Characters Lacking… Character
Spiritfarer supposedly boasts 11 different characters that you can find, bring onto your ship, and help out. The goal is to uncover each character’s story, help them come to terms with their life, and eventually help them move on.
Candidly, Vuk and I never made it that far in the game. We discovered the first four or five characters — each of whom inexplicably knew Stella from when they were alive — but, for us, their personalities felt flat, and uncovering bits of their story never seemed to make them more interesting.
This was one of the most disappointing aspects of the game.
The goal, of course, was for you to become friends with each side character, and then for it to be difficult to say goodbye to them at the end of the game. This would have allowed you to feel sorrow alongside your character.
Unfortunately, the stories just never… mattered… that much. The characters were — at best — mediocre, and at worse, actively annoying (looking at you, Gwen). As a result, I never felt the impetus to finish their stories, and would have been more than content to let a few of them off at the entrance to the Spirit world…
…or directly into the ocean…
…if only so I didn’t have to keep managing their needs.
Which brings us to…
Tamagotchi Redux… or Maybe More Like Neopets
The majority of the time we spent playing Spiritfarer, we were tasked with feeding our friends, giving them hugs, and building their houses.
There is no real consequence to not keeping your friends happy, but doing so occasionally leads them to provide you with supplies, like thread.
Unfortunately, the repetitiveness of these tasks was unrelenting… and a bit stupid. I can’t count the number of times Vuk groused, “Why are we feeding them? They’re supposed to be dead!”
It reminded me a bit of the days of Tamagotchi, when you would use tiny, mundane tasks to keep your tiny pets happy. But at least Tamagotchis would die if you neglected them for too long.
There was a certain level of tension there.
There’s no tension with Spiritfarer. Which, I guess, makes it more like Neopets.
But, like. Less fun.
Ho-Hum Mini Games
Before you accuse me of hating on casual games entirely, let’s be clear: I’m an avid Simmer, and I’ve played through my share of relaxing, casual games. I’m currently wending my way through Kynseed (amazing!) and I played the crap out of Stardew Valley when it came out.
The thing that really makes these types of games stand out is engaging mini-games and tasks that you really want to complete. Unfortunately, this is the area where Spiritfarer was most lacking. Most of its minigames were ho-hum at best.
The best games involved catching jellyfish as they shot by or catching lightning as it hit the ship. But both of these games just gave a ton of opportunities to collect what you needed, and made it impossible to collect all of the items, so they didn’t feel like games of skill so much as opportunities to swipe a handful of items out of an overflowing bucket. There was no challenge to them, and there was no sense of accomplishment, because you couldn’t really get better at it. There wasn’t even a high score list or anything to allow you to compete with yourself.
Most of the other minigames, including fishing and making cloth, involved pressing a button within a small window of opportunity.
With less entertaining results.
There were a lot of things they could have done. They had a rhythm game built in, and could have done something cool with that, but instead they had just one song that you played on repeat.
So, we flitted from monotonous mini-game to monotonous mini-game, feeling neither an impetus to complete the games nor a sense of accomplishment when they were done.
Saying Goodbye Was Far Too Easy
In the end, Vuk and I chose not to finish Spiritfarer. Once it stopped being pretty, it was just… boring. Even the couch co-op experience, which often saves games for us, was just… meh.
I’m giving this game a lackluster 4/10. I know it’s gotten a lot of rave reviews for being a good casual game, and maybe we’re just missing something, but I genuinely didn’t enjoy this title.
It was pretty. There was nothing wrong with it on a technical level.
But it wasn’t fun. And, at the end of the day, games are supposed to be fun.
It’s a question that many children are asked ad nauseam throughout their childhood, as if a four-year-old’s passing interest in rocks should lock her into a life-long career as a geologist. But the game Growing Up takes this concept to the next level, with every choice you make from infancy onward compiled to determine your future career.
Growing Up is an indie role-playing sim developed by Vile Monarch and published by Vile Monarch and Littoral Games. It was recommended to me by a close friend, and I downloaded it on Steam and played through my first pass at the game on the same day. I’ve since played through it five or six more times, and will probably give it another go the next time I get bored.
The premise of the game is simple. You start off as a baby, and make choices throughout your childhood until you turn eighteen. The choices you make and the people you meet impact your future career and the futures of the people you meet.
Time is of the Essence
The whole point of Growing Up is that you start as a baby and literally grow up throughout the game until you turn eighteen.
Each round of the game, you have four things to do:
You choose which new skills you want to learn
You connect your brain neurons together to improve your character stats
You take actions, from practicing skills to interacting with people, that impact your happiness, your parents’ happiness, your wealth, and your stats
You finish the round by practicing learned skills or activities
Once you finish a round, time passes, and you start the next round. It’s not quite one round per year of your life — it’s more like 3-5 rounds per year of your life — but time moving forward is a continual aspect of the game that you have to pay attention to.
It’s not quite Sifu-levels of aging, but it still matters.
Within your character’s 18 years of life, you also have certain milestones at which you test your development. The game gives you “exams.” There’s one at the end of preschool, one at the end of elementary school, one at the end of middle school, and one at the end of high school.
I’ll get into the exams themselves later, but essentially, the first three exams give you an idea of how you’re doing, and the final exam ends the game and helps determine your character’s life path from then on.
What I loved about this system is that you have a finite amount of time to develop your character into the person you want them to be. In an otherwise laid-back game, it gave you clear markers of success and goal posts along the way.
Speaking of having a finite amount of time, let’s talk about…
Managing Your Spoons
The spoon theory was developed to help people with mental health problems or disabilities discuss low energy levels and productivity with friends and family. The idea is that each task takes up a certain amount of energy – or spoons – and people with mental health or disabilities may have fewer spoons than their contemporaries or may use more spoons per task.
Playing Growing Up was like watching the Spoon Theory in action. Each round of the game, you had a certain number of energy points, and you had to decide what actions to spend those points on. Would you learn a new skill, boosting your intelligence and your parents’ view of you? Or would you play a game and boost your morale?
Managing your spoons was important because you had different stats to keep track of throughout the game. Specifically, you had to pay attention to:
Your happiness: This is the first stat you manage starting in preschool. You gain happiness when you do “fun” things, such as watching TV or playing hopscotch, and lose happiness when you work or study.
Your parents’ happiness: Your parents are happiest when you’re studying hard, and become less happy when you are having fun. (Is it problematic that your parents only like you if you’re stereotypically successful? Probably. But that’s a discussion for another day).
Your money: Money is introduced once you hit middle school. You can use money to buy food that boosts your happiness, items that boost your parents’ opinions of you, or items that boost your brain power in different ways. You can also buy aesthetic updates for your character (like haircuts or new clothes).
If your happiness or your parents’ happiness drops all the way to zero, you get a strike. If you get three strikes, you lose the game and have to start over from scratch.
I’m not exactly sure what happens to your character when you lose, but I imagine it’s something like this:
This was the aspect of the game that gave it a little bit of a challenge, especially because the things that made you happiest made your parents least happy — and vice versa.
There were things you could do to help your energy levels go further. For example, there were items you could purchase with in-game currency to add a boost to either your happiness or your parents’ happiness.
You could also choose to take a round to go on vacation, which would give you certain skill points and increase your happiness without decreasing your parents’ happiness. And every couple of rounds, your parents would come up with a unique challenge for you — like raising your empathy — that would improve their happiness without impacting your happiness.
Though I never got all the way to three strikes in my playthroughs, I have gotten one or two strikes before, and managing my character’s happiness against my parents’ happiness definitely fueled some of the decisions I made each round.
Connecting Those Neurons
One of the coolest aspects of Growing Up was how you developed your character.
Instead of a traditional skill tree, like you’d expect in most RPGs, this game puts you into a randomly-generated brain map each round. Within that brain map, you decide which neurons to connect, which puts points into one of five stats:
Intelligence
Empathy
Physique
Memory
Imagination
Different stats were used for different skills. For example, if you want to learn history, you need to develop your memory stats. But if you want to play football, you need to boost your physique.
Each round, you had a certain number of “brain points” you could use to build a path through your brain and connect those neurons. You could also find neurons that would give you more brain points for the round, or special neurons that would reveal more of the brain map (so you could chart a more strategic path).
This part of the game was simple and repetitive, but also quickly became one of my favorite parts.
I will say that when I first started playing the game, I focused on trying to keep everything even. In later playthroughs, I found I had more fun if I tried to envision an actual personality for my character and focus on specific strengths.
I will also say that it’s a good idea to connect the little graduation caps when you can. I ignored them at first, but they give you more brain points, and those carry forward to subsequent rounds. So they’re almost more important than any individual stat.
Either way, the points you collect when building your brain pathway impact your character for life. They steadily gain more points into different personality traits. This lowers the amount it costs to learn new skills, and also opens new skills up for you to learn.
Test Prep
Each round (starting in elementary school), you’ll see a marker on your screen that says “Exam Readiness” and gives a percentage.
You can bolster your exam readiness by learning academic skills and by mastering those skills. The more ready you are for your exam, the more moves you have to complete the exam.
The exams themselves act as a sort of color-matching minigame. Match the right colors, and you can answer one of the test questions. Answer enough questions, and you boost your grade on the test. You start with an F, and the more questions you answer, the closer you get to a high grade.
Grades of B or higher improve your parents’ happiness, while also giving you slight benefits to your overall character stats. On the other hand, if you get below a C…
Well… it’s less good.
In the final round of the game, your exam score “greatly impacts” the ending you receive.
The Friends You Meet
Although the concept behind Growing Up was fun, and the minigames engaging in a relaxing way, the place where this game really shone was with its characters.
Starting in elementary school, you have the ability to meet different characters. Some characters, like the short-order cook at the local cafe, are always available to you. But the friends you meet at school are randomly generated each round.
There are nine of these characters in all. Each one has the potential to be romanced (though they have built-in sexual orientations, so your gender will matter), and you can either build your relationship with them up and help them achieve their personal “good ending,” or you can neglect your relationship with them and push them toward their “bad ending.”
#BadEndings
Although none of their stories were amazing, they were each unique enough that I wanted to see them through to their ends.
And because the characters you meet are randomized each round, it’s impossible to get all their endings in one go. In fact, I’ve played this game a number of times, and there’s still one character (Kato) whom I’ve never met.
Additionally, the choices you make when interacting with these characters aren’t always straightforward. Sometimes, you make the wrong judgment and say the wrong thing, and just like in real-life, it can have long-term consequences.
In fact, some of the characters require you to make questionable (read: immoral) decisions in order to achieve their good ending, meaning you have to decide whether you want to focus on improving those friendships or focus on making your character a “good person.”
These choices and differences make Growing Up fun even on a replay. If additional DLCs provided more characters, I’d download them in a heartbeat and replay the game as many times as it took to see all the endings.
And Round and Round It Goes
When you complete Growing Up, you get to learn what happened to your character. Specifically, you learn about their future career — which is determined based on their final exam score and the traits and activities you focused on throughout the game — and you learn what happened to each of the NPCs you encountered.
Afterward, your character marries (either someone you met in the game or someone new), and you have a baby of your own… which becomes the protagonist of the next playthrough.
I liked this circular system of gameplay. Unfortunately, it fell a little flat because once your character became an adult, they lost any/all personality they had developed, and spoke and acted just like every other set of parents in the game.
The parents have limited dialogue options, and even NPCs who had vibrant personalities as kids have the same hum-drum adult personalities as any set of parents.
I would have loved it if unlocking different NPCs as spouses unlocked different parent dialogue options, or if unlocking different careers passed down different benefits to your kids. That would have made it feel impactful. As it was, the cyclical nature of the game just felt gimmicky.
They took their inspiration from Lamb Chops
All Grown Up
I’ve finished Growing Up a number of times, and each time I felt a sense of satisfaction with the ending. It’s a pretty short game to play, but the replayability makes it worth every penny. A completely original soundtrack and a selection of interesting characters bring an otherwise solid casual gameplay experience to a whole new level.
I’m giving Growing Up an impressive 8/10. It’s not the best game in the world on a technical level, and if you don’t like casual indie games, it’s not the title for you. But while I would have loved to have seen more attention paid to the adults of the game, at the end of the day, Growing Up did what it set out to do, was fun to play — and replay — and had interesting gameplay mechanics that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
I won’t pretend that everyone will like the game as much as I did. You very much have to enjoy casual simming games to like this title. But if you’re looking for a relaxing experience with a little bit of story and a little bit of heart, I highly recommend this indie title.
Now, I just need to go back and play one more time so I can figure out who the hell Kato is…
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The game takes place inside the journal of a young girl. As she reads the pages aloud, a metaphorical version of her platforms over letters and words to uncover a story. Vuk picked the game out for me, figuring that I—an English major and freelance writer—would appreciate the premise. This means that, for once, I was the one playing the majority of the game while Vuk watched.
In this Lost Words: Beyond the Page review, I’ll discuss everything I loved about this game, as well as a few pages I’d remove from this story if I could.
Choose Your Words Carefully
The main concept of Lost Words is that you are a young girl and aspiring writer taking her first shot at writing a story. The game vacillates between the journal of the girl, where she talks about her daily life with her parents and grandmother, and the story she is writing.
What makes this interesting is that, while the game itself is largely linear and narrative in nature, it uses words to create light platforming puzzles.
The journal portions of the game are minimalist in nature. You literally see lines on a notebook paper, with the girl voicing the lines as they’re being written. You control a sketched depiction of the girl as she platforms across the lines in the notebook and occasionally moves words from one line to another to uncover the story.
When you’re dealing with the story the girl is writing, the world comes alive with color and light. The main character of the story has a book, and when she finds words in the universe, she can add them to her book and use them to solve puzzles. For example, the word “Repair” allows you to fix broken bridges or recover long-forgotten statues, while the word “Burn” can light torches along walls or explode Boom-Shrooms to open passageways.
We’re always prepared to open passageways.
This made for an interesting mechanical style that was, by and far, my favorite part of the game. Vuk said he might have preferred a little more of a distinction between the puzzles in the journal section and the puzzles in the main character’s story, but I felt like the distinction between the real world and Estoria was prominent enough.
Although the puzzles were never particularly challenging, I enjoyed the choice the writers made to make the words integral in the gameplay, and I found it truly enjoyable.
Don’t Cry for Me
By and large, the message behind Lost Words: Beyond the Page is one of loss, heartbreak, grieving, and hope.
Although I guessed the ending of the story within the first few minutes, the writer still managed to craft a tale so poignant and true to life that it made Vuk and me both cry. The story isn’t necessarily unique, and there weren’t any major twists or turns. But in some ways, that was the point. The story felt true to life, and for that reason, it was heart-wrenchingly relatable.
But despite being a tale of loss and grief, Lost Words also had something important to say about hope for the future and the importance of building good memories with the people you love. While it was, overall, a heart-numbing tale, it also had a strong message about the cyclical nature of life, and for that reason, the ending felt woefully bittersweet.
An Overlong Final Chapter
Throughout Lost Words, the pacing was beautifully slow. This was not a “run in and beat ‘em up” type of story. It was a graceful ballet of words, slowly stretching out across the pages. And for most of the story, that worked wonderfully, ensuring the narrative remained the most important part of the game.
But then the ending happened.
The ending of the girl’s real-life story happened first. It was poignant, and beautiful, and it made us cry.
Then, the game threw us into the ending of the story the girl was writing. Based on the climax that had just occurred in the girl’s journal, we were expecting an ending that was tight in nature and wrapped the novel up succinctly. Instead, what we received was an overlong, poorly paced ending chapter that relied too heavily on the puzzle-platforming elements and wound up losing track of the story in the process.
And after half an hour of superfluous platforming, we stared at the screen like…
As a result, while the “first ending” — the ending of the girl’s real story — was beautiful and poignant, the ending of the girl’s novel felt arduous and self-serving.
A Game Worth Paging Through
Overall, Lost Words: Beyond the Page told a beautiful — if not entirely unique — story in an incredibly interesting way. Despite the overlong ending, it was a fairly short game, taking us just two evenings to play through. But the amount of time it spent on the game was plenty to tell a compelling story and get a good message across while allowing us to enjoy some truly interesting gameplay mechanics.
I’m giving Lost Words: Beyond the Page a bittersweet 7/10. I applaud the mechanics they chose to use — even if they felt a bit more choppy on console than they probably feel on PC — and I enjoyed the game enough to recommend it to people who enjoy casual games that unfold slowly over time.
If I could just place the “Ignore” word over the over-long second ending, I might even be willing to play it again myself.
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