Spirittea

Adorable game! I loved the art style, the music, and the humor. Village games aren't usually my favorite due to the grind of making friends with everyone but this one makes it much easier to focus on a person and get it done fairly quickly instead of only getting one interaction a day. And being able to sleep to pass time definitely helps avoid getting stuck in end game when you find out something you need to do only shows up in a season across the year from you. The wide variety of things to do kept me entertained and even when I had to focus on something I wasn't particularly interested in it never takes overly long. Kudos to the creators!

This game is downright adorable, reminding me quite a lot of Stardew Valley with the world building while also being different and inventive with it's mechanics. You're a person that arrives in a town your relative used to live in to write a book, but you find out that you're actually kind of important to a side of the town that nobody really knows about and has forgotten about. As you play you find more and more forgotten bits and bobs, it's quite a fun experience uncovering it all. I'm surprised more haven't jumped at this game it's a really nice decompressing play. Despite being about finding ghosts, it's not scary at all (although I love a good pixel horror). There's a focus on gathering items and completing puzzles to progress the game, you can complete the game pretty fast actually if you wanted to, but I myself have not beat it yet because I would like to get all of the spirits. It plays smooth for the most part, I haven't really gotten stuck because there's many outlets to focus on. It's like a knot that gets untied when you pull the end you didn't think could be the solution, which is very satisfying. When you're grinding it can get a bit annoying that the 'run' and 'use item' button are the same, but if the item doesn't have a use case then it's fine. In all, definitely would recommend if you or someone you're thinking about getting a gift for needs to chill out and be kind of like a little detective.

I have many issues with this game. First: The game only captures material cultures of Japan, and completely ignores everything else. I have a huge problem with Miko. I find it weird to give her such a quirky personality when elders culturally tend to be more formal and reserved. I get what they're trying to do, but it feels more like a western game interpretation instead of a culturally realistic one. The name also feels very out of place for her, Miko is usually a name for shrine maidens, but in recent times its a more common japanese name. Its so out of place to give an elder a relatively modern name. It feels like they picked the name just because it sounded "Japanese", without knowing/caring for the actual meaning. Another character that bothered me was "Young". Young is a super unrealistic name for someone in Japan. Its an english word, not something you'd use as a given name there. I understand if they meant it like "Yeong" or "Yong", but those have Korean origins, it wouldn't appear in a japanese-style game anyway. It feels like they just went for aesthetic guessing instead of actually paying attention to the culture. Another thing that bothers me: The game is extremely clunky for PC. I understand its made for probably a switch/console/deck release, but its the bare minimum to not make your game clunky on a widely used platform such as PC. Last thing: The tutorial, oh god the tutorial. I gave up even playing this game and watched videos of it instead due to how annoyingly long the tutorial is. Its mostly just talking too, not ACTUALLY teaching you the controls, This game has so much potential, but they completely missed the mark, I hope their future games are culturally more accurate and less annoying to play. (I just noticed this review sounds like a redditor...oops T_T)

Quite a fun and cute sim game - I'm not really sure how to classify it more specifically that that, as you spend equal amounts of time befriending villagers, curing bad spirits and tending the bath house. I love love love the bath house management part of the game and wish that was more of what you were doing, but the other elements are still fun. The spirits also have my fave designs by far! I was a little put off by the artstyle for the character portraits at first, but they mostly ended up growing on me too c: I like that different villagers like doing different activities, but it does make things a bit unbalanced - if you're anything like me, you will be able to befriend all of the karaoke lovers immediately, but those that like the nightly drinking game, or digging for treasure can take quite some time. Some of the bad spirits can be a be a little finicky to cure too - if you're just a little too early or late to catch them doing their bad deeds, it will fail you and you'll have to try again the next day/week, and I had a couple that I was worried were bugged at first because it was so hard to get the timings right. It is also odd that you need to do so little to technically finish the game - I finished writing my book way before I had unlocked half the spirits, before I'd had my first winter and I still have areas of the bath house closed off to me, which made my game end up trailing off weirdly, as I felt both that I had not saved enough spirits/ befriended people enough to leave town, but ended up getting a bit fatigued trying to get them all (and waiting for winter). Overall I had a good time with the game, but I'm not sure it's one I'll be getting to 100% and having repeat play throughs with.

I was hoping for a Spirited Away meets Stardew Valley but sadly it doesnt work. The bathhouse is too slow. Maybe it gets better after day 4?

love it!! fun and aesthetically pleasing! runs fine on older hardware:)

This is such a fun and relaxing game. I wouldn't try to play this in short sessions either. This is a game you can truly lose HOURS of time in without feeling like it has passed. I have never played Stardew, but I am sure it is similar...without the ghosts and such.

I played this game for a year and a half now. Seeing its yokai puzzles and inventory management improved in the second update is great. While tending the spirits in the bathhouse is still relaxing, I wish Cheesemaster could allow more neighbors to work the same jobs. The 2.0 update also struggles to slow down within certain areas now, like at the Bathhouse, I've experienced a sudden lag spike due to the amount of spirits in the main area. Hopefully I'll see a new update patch this error soon. This game was intentionally for anyone still using a windows 7 computer after all.