Spiritfarer's devs discuss how the game came to be, and the importance of death as a theme

Thunder Lotus Games seems to have a theme of death running through all their titles, and Spiritfarer is no different. In an interview with GamesIndustry, the game's creative director, Nicolas Guérin talks about how Spiritfarer came to be, and how death not only plays into the game, but the importance of talking about death in general.

"The games the company released before were all based somehow in mythology. The initial pitch for Spiritfarer was to do a farm sim-lite game with the concept of the myth of the souls of the dead on the river Styx, but in a much more colorful and bubbly way, which was nicely supported by the art direction. Once we had that core principle, we then thought about the actual theme and message and pretty quickly came up with the idea of talking about death lightly, in the sense that it's a dark subject matter but we wanted to talk about it in an uplifting way.

And we don't talk about death enough. It's something that's going to happen to all of us; spoiler alert! But in Western civilization, we tend to forget about it or try to make sure that it's hidden as much as we can. How many people have you seen die? Not many. But I think we're all haunted by the idea of it, and the more you get used to the idea, the easier it becomes to accept it. The whole idea is to talk about death in a way that makes you have an insight on it that's positive rather than negative and dark."