Thunder Lotus, developer of such indie titles as Jotun and Sundered, has just released its latest game, Spiritfarer, a game about ferrying souls to the afterlife. This week has seen Spiritfarer launching for a growing list of platforms, and as a result, plenty of players are discovering the cheeky reference the game makes to Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series.
It actually makes a lot of sense for there to be some overlap between Animal Crossing and Spiritfarer. Like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Spiritfarer features a human protagonist and a supporting cast of distinct anthropomorphic animal characters, a relatively chill vibe, and gameplay that revolves around managing resources to create a personalized space surrounded by water. And as Kotaku points out, Spiritfarer even has its own version of Animal Crossing’s capitalism-happy raccoon, Tom Nook.
Early on, players find themselves coming to the island settlement of Hummingberg, at the guidance of one of their passengers, a deer named Gwen. It’s there that they discover a shop called Raccoon Inc., run by a raccoon named Theodore. Already, the similarities to Tom Nook and his Nook Inc. brand are glaring, but it becomes even more apparent when it’s revealed that everything Theodore is selling costs far more than what players will likely have by this point in Spiritfarer, making all of it unattainable.
Luckily for players, Theodore does get called out for it, as Gwen berates him with a series of insults, calling him “trash panda” and his shady business practices “the reason we have middle fingers.” This leads him to drop his prices to a manageable level, while probably leaving a lot Animal Crossing fans wishing they could do the same to Tom Nook.
Spiritfarer is available for PC, PS4, Stadia, Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: Kotaku