Flowing through the seas of time
Memories that were left behind
Bring us closer to the end
Of this journey where we grew as friends

And I’ll take your hand and guide you through
All the steps one takes to move on to
A place, a world unseen to us all
But it’s ok we’ll be together
My friend

Spiritfarer offers an amazing emotional experience in a beautifully crafted world accompanied by a soothing soundtrack.

You get to fill the shoes of the ferryman Charon who has to guide the souls of the deceased to the so called Everdoor in order to let them take their final voyage. With this, you set out on your ever-growing vessel to find, get to know, connect to and in the end bid farewell to different personalities pictured as lovely animated animals. In the beginning you start by getting to know their past lives, their preferences and their characters as a whole, build them a place to be while they are with you on the ship and continue to improve it. Each character comes with a dedicated quest-line that often helps you improving your ship with a more diverse set of farms, orchards, smithies, cow sheds and many more. In the course of your journey you help them with their memories, cook them their favourite food and, most importantly, offer them a hug when they are feeling low. In exchange they show you how to interact with a wide range of weather/world effects like fighting off lightning storms, dragons, glowing jellyfish or comet showers.

When it is finally time to bid farewell these characters offer a well-written insight on different aspects of living and even though the procedure is always the same, it almost never misses it's point: An emotional but hopeful final segment of letting go of a person you've grown attached to. After they left, there are only their words, memories and their houses left on the ship to remind you and others of what their life was like, what they loved and accomplished.

Gameplay-wise it can be noted that the management aspect is pretty generous and rarely punishes mistakes. It is more exploration and narration-driven but still the amount of different genres that are mixed into the minigames of mining, farming, fishing or woodworking make it feel really unique. You can expect your first run to take about 30 hours and since this game auto-saves a lot, you can always go back to an early state in case you missed something or want to replay a specific section.

Overall, Spiritfarer is a wonderful game that takes you on an unique journey with a well-written narration, sad, funny & joyous moments, a fantastic musical rendition and a laid-back gameplay-loop that rarely feels old since it doesn't force you into a certain playstyle. I can highly recommend this game to anyone who is looking for a heart-warming & emotional experience with a fantastic art direction.

IMMORTALITY is Sam Barlow's most ambitious work so far and one of the most interesting concepts in storytelling in games I've experienced for quite some time.

In contrast to his previous works (Her Story & Telling Lies) it feels on one hand like a very consistent sequel while still on the other hand doing something completely new. You follow the story of Marissa Marcel - a young actress who played the leading role in three movies that never got released and disappeared afterwards.

Like in the aforementioned games you mainly search through archive footage of those three movies in order to get an understanding of the different plots and their connection to Marissa's disappearance. But unlike the gameplay in Her Story you now pick objects or persons in the scene you're watching to get to another one. On this way, clip by clip, you picture together the three films, broaden your perspective and unveil the mystery beyond the overall plot. Sometimes you get to clips that last like 3 seconds until you realize that you can rewind them to get the full scene. An algorithm is supposed to primarily take you to clips that are either new, interesting or relevant.

Production-wise IMMORTALITY represents an impressive milestone for Sam Barlow & the studio Half Mermaid. They basically wrote three different movies that play in different timelines and are connected through a meta-narrative. On this note I highly recommend playing the game with a controller since other input devices can't really reproduce the special effect the game comes up with later on.

I nominated this game in the Steam Awards 2022 for the "Outstanding Story-Rich Game" Award because after roughly one hour of gameplay you'll get to a moment that shifts the whole experience to another level and turns around every conclusion about the narrative you might have grasped before.