#spirittea

In the game you're a person who just moved to the countryside and, as fate has it, you suddenly have to run a bathhouse for spirits in order to maintain balance and avoid they forget themselves and start causing trouble for the locals. There's a whole lore about the spirits, the bathhouse and why you're able to help.

If you like Stardew and/or Spirited Away (from studio ghibli) this game is the perfect combination of it.

And while you can't romance the NPCs, you can make friends and ask them to help you run the bathhouse. Instead of gifting, your friendship levels grow by doing their favorite activities with them, like going to karaoke, catching bugs or fishing. The interactions with the characters and spirits are absolute gold. And they're GORGEOUS!

Here are some of them:

And also, here are some poorly taken photos of the game

Is not just decorative. You can sit down and work on your book.

There's a progress bar which means presumably I can actually finish writing the book.

This though:

The town is gorgeous and the villagers are actually interesting like why does Gabe know a shady black market-esque fence and have 180,000 followers online yet he hates people and mostly sticks to himself? It makes me want to talk to everyone to get to know them all.

The gameplay is so janky tho, like there needs sooo many bug fixes its funny. Textures fail to load, I fell through the ocean, the ocean specific fishing rod was going crazy whenever i used it, got stuck inside multiple trees, flew head over handlebars on my stolen bike multiple times and couldnt get back up and half the time i was either clipping through things or stuck getting around things.

That being said it has potential to be one of the best farming sims. Its a perfect mix of Stardew Valley (obv), Spirittea and the recent open word Pokemon games. It was extremely cozy and I love the detail with the cooking system and how cooking and meals are actually important to energy regen. I am still a bit confused with the battle system but I havnt really proritised the caves much. The soundtrack is delightful and so is the arcade at the pub where you can play the claw machine. I also like the value of things like sometimes the cost of items or the money players will get for selling something is crazy but i feel like the economy is balanced fairly well.