#feb 9th

Case in point - I played for ten hours before writing this review, and I unlocked precisely zero achievements. Xbox statistics give the percentage of players that have won the most common achievement (beating an NPC in a drinking minigame) at just 6.6%. I’m not surprised either - the glacial pace the game moves at made those 10 hours feel like 20. As a completionist, in some ways I’m glad this one never got officially added to the gamercard, because the full 1000g will take you an absolute minimum of 60 hours.

It’s really disappointing, because the concept sounded appealing and the art style is pretty nice. The game is stingy on details, and quests are less than intuitive to solve - an early ghost hunt saw me trying to chase down a vandal on several different days, failing thanks to an offscreen movement behind a rock that didn’t seem interactable, even using my spirit vision. Another saw me waiting til 3am multiple nights in a row for a spectre that would never spawn - it turned out that the two conversations I had about the late night noises and hidden door weren’t enough to trigger the appearance, and I needed a third talk to repeat some of the info before it would spawn in. It doesn’t feel like a purposeful journey to discover information, but like you’re fumbling in the dark to figure out what the game actually wants.

The controls are needlessly complex, requiring several button presses to open the inventory, pick up and stow items, or check your quests. I imagine they were designed for (and likely work well on) PC first, but they just don’t fit with a controller. Serving customers in the bathhouse works well, but with the sheer amount of mechanics crammed in, the rest of the game suffers. In an attempt to imitate the games that came before it, Spirittea also features fishing, cooking and even bug hunting. These control just as awkwardly as the rest of the game, requiring pixel perfect aim on a very imperfect grid or super detailed recipes with no guide on where to find the ingredients you need. It’s like the game is just waiting for you to make a mistake and waste your ingredients, lose your catch or get stung by a bug. Well, at least you can enjoy the bathhouse sections, right? Wrong.

The spirits themselves need to be seated when they do arrive in your bathhouse, involving another guessing game to work out what season each beast is a part of and how that should play into your seating system. I’m aware that there’s a few pages of an old book you can eventually dig up that give you hints on this, but it’s another level of unnecessary complexity that just serves to make this even more of a slog than before. I can handle some strange mechanics with a pretty high learning curve (Cultist Simulator my beloved) but even pushing double digits on this one didn’t help - it’s just exhausting to manage and not even satisfying to work out your own system.

Whilst I didn’t enjoy my time with Spirittea, I did appreciate the Japanese setting and lore, and it could be better enjoyed if you play it in shorter bursts, perhaps. Since I played it through Game Pass, I didn’t spend any money on it, which is a pretty damning plus to point out. I hope the devs are able to focus down in the future and maybe work on a smaller, tighter game that doesn’t fall prey to the over complicated controls and mechanics of this one. Still, Spirittea did accomplish one good thing for me - it inspired me to reinstall Stardew Valley!

Pros:

• Pleasant aesthetic and graphical style

• Does offer multiplayer coop mode

• Bathhouse mechanics do work well, at least for the basics

Cons:

• So overstuffed with content that it can’t progress with any pace