Why Games Like Wanderhome, Chicory, and Spiritfarer Work So Well
Think of your pet. Or, if you don’t have a pet, think of a friend or family member’s pet, or a pet you might like to have someday. Imagine that dog that you see walking down the street, the stray cat that trots through your garden, the fish you had when you were a kid. Think about how much you care about that animal. Think about how you would take care of it and nurture it and make sure it’s healthy and happy.
Why don’t we treat ourselves with the same love and care?
Games like Wanderhome, Chicory, and Spiritfarer use our inherent love of animals and our instinct to care for them to make us realize that we are worthy of that love as well. The creator of Wanderhome, Jay Dragon (no pronouns), even shared a meme about the game that expresses how this is the exact intent behind it:
Wanderhome is a tabletop role-playing game system where you and your fellow players are a group of wandering animals in a land that is inherently kind. The game explicitly says this: “In the Hæth, we’ll be meeting people who are fundamentally good. This will not be true of all the places you go in your life, but on the journey contained within this book, nearly everyone can be trusted to be kind.” There is a certain suspension of disbelief here, in the assumption that everyone is trusted, but there is also an emphasis on beginning to open yourself up to trusting others. Furthermore, there are many themes of trauma, recovery, family, and love in the different Playbooks of Wanderhome. There are also representations of different interpretations of gender, the option to discard the ideas of masculinity and femininity, and official art where one of the animals is in a wheelchair.
Our inherent empathy and sympathy for animals of any kind leads us to care much more for our player characters, and love the flaws in them that we also have in ourselves. Player characters in TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games) are often a reflection of the person playing them, in one way or another, and playing a game that expressly wants you to accept and love these parts of yourself, either as something to grow from or something you have to live with, can be extremely therapeutic.
Chicory and Spiritfarer, on the other hand, are video games where you are generally an outsider looking in on tough personal journeys.
In Chicory, you play as a young dog — I’ll refer to him as Pizza here, as that seems to be the official character name, but he’s named after whatever you put as your favorite food before the game starts — who is handed a huge responsibility that he isn’t sure he’s ready to handle, being given the title of Wielder. Although you are dealing with and working through Pizza’s anxiety and self-doubt, a large part of the game is also a symbolic representation of generational trauma. Without spoiling too much of it, the Wielder before you, Chicory, struggles greatly with what appears to be depression and anxiety, as well as the same self-doubt that Pizza has. The Wielder before Chicory is implied to have struggled with similar issues later in the game. The theme of believing you don’t deserve success or praise is much like the themes in Wanderhome of being fundamentally deserving of love without needing to take any action to be worth it.
Spiritfarer is a game about death, forgiveness, and trauma. You play as Stella, a human girl who has recently become the Spiritfarer, tasked with helping animal spirits come to terms with their lives and get to the point where they are ready to pass through the Everdoor. As of writing this, I am about a fifth of the way into the game, and I’ve already cried over it. This game is absolutely beautiful and does an impeccable job of making death, recovery, and acceptance a peaceful and cathartic experience. It is a game about loving those around you and taking care of them until they are ready to take care of themselves.
These games are all heavy, dealing with topics that are intense and difficult to articulate, but light in their tone and gameplay. Chicory is about painting and coloring in the world. Spiritfarer is a cozy game where you farm, build homes, cook, weave fabric, and do much more. Wanderhome encourages love, kindness, and hospitality between you and your party members. Part of the reason that these games are more palatable for the average player than intensely emotional games, Life is Strange and Telltale’s The Walking Dead come to mind, is because the characters are animals. We can simultaneously distance ourselves from the concepts and relate to them without feeling called out. We see animals and immediately jump to the feeling of unconditional love and care without them doing anything other than existing.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the same instinct for human characters. Even in games like The Walking Dead, where all the characters are in danger together and the second character we meet is a child that we do have that instinct to care for, we later learn that trust is hard to earn. We learn that we should be skeptical of everyone else in the world except for ourselves.
Wanderhome, Spiritfarer, and Chicory all combat this by setting forth an idea that every character is kind and trustworthy. And if they aren’t at first, they still have some sort of benefit for you, or we learn why they act that way later on.
I highly encourage everyone to play Spiritfarer and Chicory — they are both single player games available on several different consoles as well as PC. And if you have friends who are interested (or if you’d like to play it solo, as there are ways to do that,) I recommend playing Wanderhome as well, or at least just reading the book because that alone is rather moving and inspiring.
But even if you don’t play any of them, I want you to take from this article that you are fundamentally deserving of love, recovery, care, and forgiveness, regardless of what you’ve been through in the past. If animals are, why wouldn’t you be?
