Spirittea’s demo delivers on adorable management and community sim gameplay

destructoid.com:

Simulators are a huge part of the gaming industry, and they’ve especially been seeing some love for the past few years after the success of games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Stardew Valley. This year it seems like there are more sims than ever, and simulators are one of my all-time favorite gaming genres, so I’m over the moon about it. Out of all the trailers for simulators we’ve seen this year, one that caught my eye was Spirittea, which is being developed by Cheesemaster Games and published by No More Robots. The logline is that it’s Stardew meets Spirited Away, which was automatically enough to get me on board. I played the demo, and so far, things look pretty promising.

It’s the classic moving-from-a-big-city-to-a-small-town story that community sims tend to have, only when you get there, you drink some special tea that allows you to see into the spirit world. Spooky! After drinking the tea, an adorable floating cat friend named Radish (how adorable!) comes to greet you, and tells you that you have been tasked with running the bathhouse on the mountain that has stood abandoned for years.

From there, most of the demo is your first day of working at the bathhouse, which leans heavily into management simulator territory. You are tasked with keeping the boiler full of fresh firewood to warm the bath water, washing and drying towels for the guests, showing guests to the bath, putting salts into the bath water… you get the idea. I used to play a lot of those Diner Dash beauty salon spinoffs on my iPod Touch back in the day, so it was pretty familiar territory there. 

There’s a mechanic in there too where each of the spirits that visits you corresponds with a season, and the spirits have a preference of where