Spritfarer and the Labor of Grief

This is a feature story from Unwinnable Monthly #185. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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In a medium that typically sees life as disposable and death as a source of fun, what room is there for grief in games?

Spiritfarer, released by Thunder Lotus in 2020, takes this question seriously, putting the theme of grief at the heart of its plot. As Stella, you’re placed in the role of “Spiritfarer”, tasked with easing the passage out of life for a cast of characters you encounter in a journey across a nautical world that is fantastical but contains traces of our own reality. Each character’s story moves towards an inevitable end point: eventually, you’ll escort them to the “Everdoor,” a portal out of life and into death. This might sound grim on paper, but Spiritfarer has been celebrated for its “death-positive” approach, with its Studio Ghibli-esque visual style and often humorous writing setting up emotionally satisfying conclusions for its characters.

But underneath this surface, Spiritfarer struck me as a game with an even deeper and more radical interest in the possibilities of grief. Perhaps surprisingly, I find this deeper interest lying not primarily in the dramatic arcs of the characters’ journeys, but in an element which rankled some critics: the game’s farming and management sim mechanics. In order to guide each passenger towards a fulfilled and meaningful end, you’ll need to spend a lot of time catering for their more basic needs along the way. This means building living quarters, growing and cooking food, and finding raw materials that can be crafted into new items and buildings. At first, these tasks might feel like “busywork” that distracts from the story’s emotional beats. But for me, this simulation of ordinary labor formed the essential grounding for the game’s messages about loss and grief.

To explain why, it’s worth comparing Spiritfarer with post-9/11 writing by the cultural and political theorist Judith Butler. This work – especially in the books Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? – has focused on the question of grief and the conditions that make it possible. For Butler, grief is not a given. While some people’s deaths are marked in our media and culture as meaningful and worth mourning, others – victims of faraway wars, for example – are often not. Some lives are grievable and others are not, certainly not because of any intrinsic difference in value, but because the conditions in which they are lived and the ways they are represented don’t allow them to register as lives that can or should be mourned. By drawing attention to these differences, Butler helps us see how political the question of grief really is.

Butler’s key question is what makes for a grievable life? – a question that Spiritfarer, in charting the process through which Stella prepares for the deaths of the characters under her care, also seems to be asking. For Butler, in order for other peoples’ lives to register as grievable, it is vital that we can recognize the “precariousness” of life which we share with them. This means being aware that we all share a vulnerability to injury and death. But it also means understanding that our physical survival is fundamentally dependent on the society in which we live – on the work of those who grow our food, build and maintain our homes, and care for us when we fall ill. Precariousness, Butler says in Frames of War, “implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other.” It’s the larger network of labor that goes into sustaining and caring for a life that lays the foundations for grief when that life comes to an end – as Butler puts it, the question of whether a life is grievable rests on the primary question of ‘whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible.” Unless we can recognize the social context that allows a person to live in the first place, we will never fully recognize their death as a moment of genuine loss.

It’s this context that is registered in Spritfarer’s mechanics of everyday work, and in the connection between these mechanics and the stories of the game’s characters. It’s through the small tasks of farming, fishing and cooking that Stella keeps her companions fed; through felling trees, cutting timber and smelting metals that she constructs their shelters. And it’s the way these apparently mundane tasks mark your progress towards the conclusion of each character’s story – each one a moment of meaningful, grievable death – that resonates so strongly with Butler’s thinking. In this way, Spiritfarer embeds a larger social structure of labor – the structure that allows for life to become grievable by facilitating the possibility of care and flourishing – into its mechanics and themes.

Rather than a distraction, then, we should see the game’s “busywork” as being exactly what makes the emotional impact of its narrative possible. It’s interesting to note that, according to the game’s creative director Nicolas Guérin, Spiritfarer’s narratives were originally built around a seasonal progression, with each character’s death taking place at a predetermined point. This was, Guérin reflects, “a bit fatalistic” and therefore “wasn’t that great.” The resulting change, favoring a system that links progress toward meaningful death with the labor simulated in the game’s mechanics, had the effect of reframing grief as the product of Stella’s work. By combining the theme of grief with the labor of care, the game doesn’t just show death and mourning in a positive light, but also makes us think about the hard work that goes into making life grievable.

This combination also makes itself felt in the details of the characters’ stories, in which labor and its politics sometimes become an explicit theme. Astrid, for example, is a trade union activist, and in order to begin her journey towards the Everdoor you’ll need to help with a struggle she’s leading against a cowardly employer: “Together, we can finally give the power back to the working class!” she tells you as she joins you on the path towards her moment of death. Grief, class and labor are bound together here. And Astrid isn’t the only trade unionist among the cast of characters: Atul the frog, too, will tell you of his life of organizing and fighting for the labor movement.

Adding these stories of class struggle to the narrative highlights the fact that the kinds of labor you’re asked to perform in the game – including agriculture, industrial production and domestic care – have historically been dominated and exploited by slavery, capital and patriarchy: sites of struggle over the ownership and autonomy of work. This is Spiritfarer’s quiet radicalism, enacted through its combination of theme and mechanics: in Stella’s work as Spritfarer, labor is reclaimed and redirected toward the ends of care and the creation of grievable life.

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Laurie McRae Andrew is a writer and critic from London. He blogs at his website and is the author of The Geographies of David Foster Wallace’s Novels: Spatial History and Literary Practice. You can find him on Bluesky and Twitter.