"[I] got to the part where an old hedgehog with dementia remembers who I am in the brief moment before she disappears, and I cried. I actually did, fuck you."
As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- As the tagline itself puts it, Spiritfarer is a cozy management game... about dying. The tearjerker moments aren't just inevitable, they're frequent: your entire job is to find these lost spirits, take care of and get to know them - and then, when they decide they're ready, to ferry them to the Everdoor, sending them off with one last hug.
- Stella's hat and cat. They were her beloved possessions in life — the hat being a reminder of her favorite vacation to Japan, and the cat being the family cat.
- After Jackie joins you in the boat it becomes apparent that his grandiose and laid back persona is a facade. He knows the mistakes he makes and is intensely self critical. In fact, despite patients actually saying they like him and thanking him because regardless of resenting a lot of it he actually does his job, Jackie considers himself a fraud and thinks very harshly of himself. Nothing of what he tries makes him feel better because he can't let go of the mistakes of his past, and goes through the Everdoor without realizing his virtues.
- When speaking to Jackie, he clearly has a lot of regrets about his past, including not appreciating his grandfather before he passed away, losing touch with his parents after a huge argument despite them putting up with his freeloading, and especially his treatment of his former patient, Daria. When retrieving Jackie's Spirit Flower, three letters are also retrieved which show that Jackie attempted to reach out to Daria for forgiveness; but considering that all the letters are crumpled, torn, or crossed out, it's clear that Jackie ultimately decided he didn't deserve to be forgiven.
- Even worse is when you bring him to the Everdoor: he starts talking about how he read a book about the afterlife in various religions, and focuses on the variants of Cessation of Existence in a way that implies that he hopes this is what awaits him beyond the Everdoor. Add that to all of the above, and it becomes almost impossible to not think that the real Jackie died in a very specific way...
- Daria's backstory: her various mental issues (she's said to have sound-to-color synesthesia, and also mentions having started hearing sounds that nobody else heard) caused a rift between her and her family, and she ended up in a mental hospital where the orderlies apparently used harsh methods to keep her restrained. While Daria is able to identify positive aspects of her unique worldview, some of her comments imply that she also wished she still had a normal, healthy connection to her family. Also, she has large gaps in her memory and goes into bouts of full-blown catatonia.
- The fact that whenever you bring someone to the Everdoor, all the other spirits line up along the stern to see them off. Moreover, it becomes two different types of sad: for the first half, when you probably have at least three or four other spirits on board at a time, it feels like you're leading your friend past a parade of well-wishers to their final reward; for the second, when you might have as few as one other spirit on board (if that), it just feels... empty.
- If you hug the other spirits before you take the one to the Everdoor, they all respond "...". They can't say anything as one of their own is crossing over to the other side.
- Alice, the sweet, grandmotherly hedgehog spirit, gradually weakens both physically and mentally until she can no longer walk unassisted and doesn't recognize Stella at all. Stella has no option but to pretend to be Alice's granddaughter Annie in order to persuade Alice to come with her to the Everdoor. As the quote above demonstrates, Yahtzee himself teared up at the scene.
- Stella's jovial uncle Atul doesn't even ask her to take him to the Everdoor. The day after you complete his ultimate request, he's simply gone, with only the Spirit Flower growing in his workshop to let you know he won't be coming back.
- Other passengers will also react to Atul's disappearance if they were invited to his party. Some like Mickey and Bruce react with indifference (they never met him, only Stella), but Stanley and Buck clearly miss him.
- Stanley's very existence is very sad, and it only gets worse when you get to know him. He's the spirit of a small child who doesn't even realize that he's dead at first. Getting to know him reveals that he's an imaginative Cheerful Child who nonetheless has strong self-loathing and a fear of failure, because of his abusive mother destroying his confidence. Stella eventually forms a sibling-like bond with him, which is why he agrees to go through the Everdoor despite being admittedly terrified and wanting his parents more than anything.
- Every other time you hug Stanley, Stella has a big smile on her face. During the hug before he passes, however, that smile is nowhere to be seen.
- At one point, Stanley tasks Stella with bringing him an item called a "fakinhage," and is surprised when Stella doesn't know what that word means. It turns out he was asking for an egg, but Stanley didn't know the word because he only recalls his mother always telling him "don't touch that fakinhage (fucking egg)."
- Astrid and Giovanni have it rough.
- Giovanni goes first after cheating on Astrid (having explicitly promised to remain faithful this time) and getting to enjoy the ship's new lounge for a bit; he's mournfully reluctant to go, but finally at the point of realizing that he can't just hang around anymore. On the boat ride over, he proclaims that, in spite of all his mistakes, he has no regrets, and implores Stella to always live life to the fullest and enjoy it, before giving one last farewell: "Ciao, bella."
- Astrid, initially, takes Giovanni's departure rather well. She admits, somewhat guiltily, that she's relieved to no longer have to deal with the back-and-forth of their relationship, and is ready to live her own life for once. Indeed, your quest at that point is to let her "live her best life," which she gets almost a week of, greeting you cheerily whenever you talk... before she abruptly asks you to bring her to the Everdoor, with clear implications that she misses Giovanni far more than she thought she would. When you take her in, she reminisces one more time on her life as all the memories fade to gray, and at the door, she demands (read: begs) that Stella never forget her.
- Worse, according to the extra material, this is simply a replay of what happened back in reality: despite loving Astrid in his own way, Giovanni continued to hurt her until the day he died. According to the art book, he betrayed her one final time, causing her to sever ties with him...but since one of Stella's memories is of her and a devastated Astrid at a dying Giovanni's bedside (with a photo of the couple in happier times nearby), this final betrayal wasn't one of his flings, but dying and leaving her behind. Despite his atrocious behavior, she never abandoned him, and while she lived on for a while afterwards, she was never the same.Lily: He was her one and only Gio.
- Through a Rewatch Bonus, Bruce and Mickey's story becomes clear. Mickey was brought to the hospital Stella worked at in a coma, and Bruce stayed there on a daily basis, dejectedly telling her stories about Mafia life. When Mickey died, Bruce was so depressed he killed himself, because he couldn't live without his beloved brother.
- Then there's Buck, who is the only companion who doesn't go to the Everdoor. He just tells you sadly wherever you're going, he can't follow. He will also gently encourage Stella to use the Everdoor for herself when all of the important missions are done. And if the player keeps ignoring their own flower, he will simply every now and then give a meaningless small sidequest in an attempt to keep her happy, doing for her what she did for the other spirits.
- The fact that the game subverts the usual "last request" storyline structure, where the spirit achieves a final goal and passes on happily. There are no true happy endings here... just a sort of warm resignation to death. Stella can't actually "fix" things for her passengers: Gwen is still bitter, Giovanni never fully repents for the pain he inflicted on Astrid, and Stanley is still scared to go on ahead. What they do have is Stella's friendship to make their resignation to their fate a little less bitter. Since the game is indicated to be the Dying Dream of a palliative care nurse, this makes a grim sort of sense: in death, as in life, she can't save her patients and loved ones, only comfort them.
- But hey, you know what's worse than ferrying other spirits to the Everdoor? Ferrying yourself to the Everdoor. Unlike every other send-off, with your friends giving their final words, it's completely silent save for the music, lending an even greater sense of finality to the whole ritual. Then you arrive, and one last time, you embrace your beloved cat, before rising up and vanishing into that great unknown... leaving behind only an empty boat, and a new constellation in the night sky.
- One detail that can make this even more heartrending is that, if you look around your ship beforehand while at the Everdoor, you'll find the lingering spirits of all the friends whom you've ferried through. They don't speak, eat, or do anything whatsoever... but you can give them all a hug (Elena included) one final time.
- A February 2021 dev update announced the arrival of three new spirit passengers over the course of the year. The first of these is Lily, Stella's sister.
- The update adds an additional chain of quests where you must go to various Sanctuaries. Each time, you see again the images that accompany your confrontations with Hades, and Lily makes various comments over them. The way she says them doesn't make sense at first... Until the last ones, where you brutally realize she's actually not here with you in this phantasmagorical world. You're hearing her talk to Stella in the real world, as she is laying in her hospital bed in her final moments. You're hearing the very last words ever spoken to Stella in her life, and they're a farewell from her little sister.
- Some of the comments give details that add to the pain. First off, it's revealed that soon after Stella left her family to live in Montreal, her father began dying from a disease. Death has been even more of a constant in her life than we thought... Even worse, when she came back after learning this, he was so bloated and disfigured by his disease that she didn't recognize him for a second!
- Then, you learn that in real life, Astrid and Giovanni eventually divorced. Yet, even after she found love anew, she never could forget him...Lily: He was her one and only Gio.
- Then, when Stella learned that she was herself condemned. The narration makes it clear that it broke her.
- Lilly's last words you hear.Lily: You've never been alone. You will never be alone.
- Once the chain of quests is completed, when comes the time to end the game and ferry yourself to the Everdoor, two changes manifest compared to the normal version.
- The quest's comment from Stella is "My time has come." After completing Lily's quests, the comment becomes "My time has come. I'm not alone. Mom and Lily are holding my hand, somewhere over there."
- When you row towards the Everdoor, a swarm of butterflies (symbolizing Lily) accompanies you. But once you reach the Everdoor, the swarm hovers a few seconds, then leaves you. Where Stella is going now, her sister can't follow.
- The In Memoriam that starts the credits. Some of the persons died in 2020 (the year the game was released), and one of them was born in 1980 — and died in 1998; this person was a friend of the game's creative director and was the inspiration for Buck. After the final update, one death was added that had a single year: 2020, meaning they died the same year they were born.
- In the final update, you have Jackie, who is a rough character, but you learn he was abandoned as a kid, got a job he was totally unsuited for, and had anger management issues that he could not resolve, leaving his spirit as bitter in death as he was in life.
"Oh God, I just want to know you're in a happier place now, Alice the Hedgehog!"
