Developer Thunder Lotus and iam8bit are scheduled to release physical editions of Spiritfarer for PS4 and Switch on August 3. Ahead of the release of the physical editions, I sat down with creative director Nicolas Guérin to discuss how folks at Thunder Lotus embraced vulnerability to create a death-positive game that deals with themes of grief, love, loss, and self-care.

In our conversation, Guérin shares how the stories told in Spiritfarer were inspired by the team's own experiences with loss. He also talks about early concepts for the game--like how Spiritfarer originally saw Stella conducting a train as opposed to steering a boat and how the cyclical gameplay loop was once tied to the changing of the seasons--and explains why these ideas were ultimately cut. There's a moment we rag on The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and bond over our love for If Found too.

As a final note before jumping into the interview, the last question of our conversation goes into spoilers for Spiritfarer. If you still haven't beaten Spiritfarer (which you should--Spiritfarer was one of GameSpot's Best Games Of 2020), don't keep scrolling when you get to the part of the interview where Guérin asks me whether I've beaten the game and I tell him I did. We discussed the ending of the game after that. There is another spoiler warning further down in the text right before we go into spoilers, but I wanted to give y'all a heads up upfront.

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