Spiritfarer Taught Me How To Forgive

Spiritfarer is celebrating its 5-year anniversary today, August 18, 2025. Below, we reflect on how the game’s compassion and empathy can help influence our own lives.

When it was first introduced, Developer Thunder Lotus billed Spiritfarer as “a cozy management sim about dying,” which immediately intrigued me. What’s so cozy about dying, and what difference does the team see between a game about dying and a game about death? The wording seemed unmistakably intentional. Many games are, to some degree, about death–and specifically, avoiding it. But Spiritfarer not only makes dying unavoidable; it makes dying the whole point. As Stella, players ferry over a dozen characters through a purgatorial plane, waving them goodbye as they cross the Everdoor into a permanent afterlife. But it’s her thoughtfulness and understanding of each passenger, regardless of the life they lived, that I find so inspiring. Stella’s hospice care approach works great on the precipice of the afterlife. But we don’t need to wait until it’s nearly too late to express such a devotion to forgiveness.

It’s Stella’s job to manage the many personalities that find their way aboard her boat, helping each passenger with their unfinished business before sending their souls floating away into the warm glow of the Everdoor. Though this sounds like the setup for something so saccharine it may induce nausea, in reality, Spiritfarer doesn’t shy from the much gloomier and less picturesque aspects of life. And yet, despite its flawed, hurting, sometimes even hurtful characters, it never wavers in its expressions of love and understanding, and it’s that difference that helped me learn something about my own life.

Each character that comes into Stella’s (after)life does so in a new physical form, like an animal, a tree, or a mushroom, but keeps intact their name and personality from their time on Earth. There’s Gwen, a surrogate big sister of Stella’s, who took up smoking as a way to protest her overbearing father. The smoking eventually killed Gwen, as she succumbed to lung cancer in her 40s, bringing her to Stella’s spacetime-defying boat in the shape of a deer.

Atul, presented as a large, jovial frog on the ferry, was, in life, a builder and a union leader. In the game, Atul is always enthused to help Stella improve her boat, but as you get to know him, you realize he has a sadness about him that he keeps from the world. On Earth, Stella knew Atul as her uncle, who disappeared back home while she was traveling abroad in her 20s. Some interpret Atul’s story to end in suicide, and when he similarly disappears from the boat one day, not allowing Stella to ferry him to the Everdoor herself, this tragic, abrupt ending is reflected in purgatory.

One of my favorites of all passengers is Giovanni, a complicated, self-obsessed man (made into a lion on the boat) who fought in World War II during his time on Earth. In life, Giovanni loved Astrid, a woman who also appears as a lion during the game, but it’s said that the two had a tumultuous relationship, partly due to Giovanni cheating on Astrid during their time together following the war.

Every character in the game’s long line of passengers is written this way; they made mistakes, they acted out of feelings like spite or impulse. Sometimes they did bad things for regrettable reasons. Some of them inflicted pain not just on themselves but on others, like Bruce and Mickey, brothers who were injured when Mickey was drunk-driving–an event that long preceded their reunion on the ferry. Stella becomes a mediator between the two, helping Bruce forgive his brother so he can find peace. Others seem tragically innocent, like Stanley, a boy who died of a terminal illness at a very young age, or Alice, an elderly woman expressing on the ferry the same dementia she suffered in life. In these instances, Stella’s task becomes less about forgiving them for their mistakes or helping them forgive themselves, and more about comforting them in their final moments.

But the universal truth of all the passengers is their need for love and understanding, which Stella never withholds from them. The last thing virtually all of them experience before swimming into the warm light of the Everdoor is an affectionate hug from Stella, a mechanic that actually has a dedicated button in the game.

Expressions of love can take different forms. For some, it’s a hug when you’re feeling blue or scared. For others, it’s taking the right tact when a loved one’s lucidity is slipping. For Stella’s passenger, Buck, love looks like buying into his fantasy role-playing obsession, yes-anding his live-action role-playing like a method actor. Bedside manner is something Stella had to learn in her life as a hospice nurse, and this quality makes her a wonderful candidate for the game’s titular role, too. She cares for everyone on the ferry, meeting each of them where they are; their flaws don’t scare her away, and their wrongdoings don’t cause her to shun or judge them. She understands she is there to bring them kindness through closure, and she is past the point of judging people for their mistakes or hardships. It’s something I’m striving to achieve in my own life.

When I moved 3,000 miles away from my parents and siblings to start my own family, it was very hard at first, then I sort of got used to it. Days come and go, and life has a way of getting in the way of letting you slow down to take inventory of what you should maybe be doing with your time. But now, with my third kid on the way and the health of a loved one deteriorating, I find myself stuck on the feelings that Spiritfarer so often grapples with. When we’re staring down the inevitable loss of someone we love, it’s easier to crystallize what it is we wish we had been saying for years before. Suddenly, the words can be found, after years of biting our tongues, failing to make amends. If you’ve not lived far away from your family before, you may not know the unique sadness you feel when you notice your parents have visibly aged between FaceTime calls with their grandkids, or when it seems like they’re noticing the same about you or your kids.

In Spiritfarer, we see this occur a lot; characters like Giovanni, Astrid, Summer, Gwen, and Stella’s sister, Lily, all get their time alone with Stella, to say what they need to say, either to Stella specifically or just to say it out loud, knowing Stella is there to listen with love and understanding. For them, it’s now or never. The Everdoor awaits, and what they need to say will be said. I think what Spiritfarer taught me is that, however helpful it may be to find that closure at the very end of a life, it’s going to be even more comforting and meaningful if you can find it sooner. I don’t want to wait until I or my loved ones are on the ferry.

I felt close to a certain loved one for most of my life, but for many reasons–geographical, political, personal, and surely others I’m not exactly cognizant of–it feels like we’ve drifted apart in recent years. They don’t have a terminal illness, but their life has been a series of hardships, and it’s taking its toll on them physically and mentally. I think I’ll lose them soon. They wear a sadness about them, a gloom that intensified when their mother died half a decade ago and has exacerbated personal issues they’ve had their entire life. Seeing how their mother’s death affected them has further led me to wonder what I can do better about my relationship with them while they’re still here.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, and I don’t believe in souls. To me, these remaining years are all I’ll get with them. There is no purgatorial safe space for us to hash it out later. There’s only here and now, so I have only now to forgive them and make our time together more meaningful. To the extent I’ve found any value in religious writings, I point to Thich Nhất Hạnh. The late Zen Buddhist monk is someone I read and re-read often. I wouldn’t be surprised if the philosopher also inspired someone at Thunder Lotus when the team was designing their unique take on Greek myth and Charon’s role in ferrying souls down the River Styx. Nhất Hạnh practiced a radical kind of forgiveness, believing that when “someone makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.” Though I don’t know if the game’s writers would endorse that view, I see a lot of his teachings inside Spiritfarer.

When Giovanni was self-absorbed, or Bruce and Mickey were straight-up jerks, or Alice was frustratingly slow to speak or make sense, Stella didn’t take offense. She didn’t overreact. She saw that their lives to that point made them that way, and it didn’t make sense to hold it against them. Instead, she accepted them, cared for them, and helped them pass on. Even now, as I try to repair my once-close relationship with this person in my life, I’ll tell you that they are incredibly frustrating at times, but lately I find myself feeling like Stella more and more, and I think it’s only a healthy thing for me. I don’t want things to feel strained, or forced, or awkward. I don’t want to hold this person’s past wrongs against them if I can instead find a way to forgive them. I don’t want to be angry about their flaws if I can instead understand that they need help, and maybe one form of help is an almost radical forgiveness. I can look inside their heart and see goodness, and when that goodness is veiled by their personal demons, I don’t let it change who they are to me.

Stella was well-practiced at being there for people who needed her due to her years working in a hospice. But we don’t have to wait until someone is receiving end-of-life care to let our guard down. Eulogies often exaggerate the good parts of a person and overlook the bad parts, memorializing by way of sugarcoating. I think what I find so refreshing and important about Spiritfarer is that it doesn’t do this. It shows you flawed people and tells you they deserve love all the same. Whatever someone has gone through, and however those experiences have shaped them, the best thing we can do is be there for them.