Spirittea

While I do recommend this, I recommend it loosely. Spirited Away fans will find lovable aspects to this game, but compared to other games of its genre, it's highly frustrating. ​Truthfully, I really like this game when I don't hate it. Unfortunately, it has a lot of issues. Here's everything wrong with it that I've found so far... ​Everything is pointlessly vague. This results in constantly Googling how systems work or what to do next. You practically need fan-made guides, especially for the bathhouse seating arrangements. ​The bag system is a clunky mess. The controls are unclear and unlabeled, resulting in accidentally dropping items on the floor or almost consuming them instead of putting them away. ​The music is quiet, loopy, and repetitive. The sound effects are equally irritating. Poor sound design completely kills cozy vibes for me. I don't even play with the sound on anymore. ​Every time your spirituality increases, the game forces a long, unskippable cutscene. Additionally, when the clock strikes midnight, a title card covers the whole screen. This completely breaks your groove when you’re in the middle of managing a busy bathhouse. ​The characters lack depth and look very same-y. The game advertises a "strictly platonic" relationship system, which I am all for. But in reality, NPCs constantly tease you, hit on you, or ask if you're hitting on them. For asexual/aromantic players expecting a truly platonic experience, it feels tacky and awkward. If there's no dating in the game, I don't feel that the characters should flirt with you. It serves no purpose. ​Outside of the bathhouse, everything feels lackluster. Worst of all, the karaoke minigame is completely broken. It’s not a rhythm game like you'd expect, and the only way to win is to literally spam every button since there's no penalty for doing so. ​❕ Major Warning for New Players ❕ Don't sell anything! ​For some baffling reason, the developers made important, one-of-a-kind items sellable. If you accidentally sell an item you need for a future shrine quest, you can permanently ruin your save file, forcing you to start the whole game over. Luckily, you will make the most money in the bathhouse, so you never really have to sell items. Regardless, I find this to be an unforgivable game design flaw, as I absolutely hate having to hold on to everything and deal with a cluttered inventory. ​My biggest disappointment is with the development team. They have publicly stated they are moving on to other projects and do not plan to release future updates or patches. The game still has many well-known, game-breaking bugs, and leaving it in this state feels incredibly disrespectful to fans. If you are expecting the years of endless love, updates, added features, and overall support that someone like Eric Barone gives to Stardew Valley, you will need to severely lower your expectations. ​If you love cozy shop managers or the Studio Ghibli aesthetic, you will find something to love here. Just be prepared for its flaws, buy it only when it's on sale, and don't expect a polished experience or a team that cares.

Spirittea on surface level sounded like a really cool game. There's time management, retro pixel graphics, existentialist premise of a writer escaping the city to the countryside, cozy elements, life sim... This was often referred to as a Spirited Away and Stardew Valley crossover, both of which I love. I love playing indie games and supporting indie developers, but reluctantly I don't recommend this game. At least not the current version of it. The execution is the problem. After 8hrs of grinding through this, with frequent checks with online fan wiki's and walkthroughs and still finding myself extremely frustrated over a quest not progressing, of saving a handful of spirits and max friending 3 NPCs..... I found the UI frustrating to deal with, which kept taking me out of the immersion, and this is coming from a hardcore rpg nerd who doesn't struggle with intuitive gaming. For ex, when you are told to pair spirits in the bathhouse from certain seasons together to max their happiness, you can't find their season category anywhere in your archives and you don't even get told their season category when you're introduced to them. I end up having to look up charts created by other gamers to make what is supposed to be basic knowledge accessible to me. Story and content-wise, it's very surface level. The relationships feel shallow with very little backstory of the people in the town you live in. The 3 heart events are just a few sentences of dialogue and the first two present you with cute gifts. The minigames weren't fun. Despite loving rhythm games, I soon found the karaoke sessions torture and not having a visible timer aggravating as I prayed for each song to end. The bathhouse sessions get repetitive fast, despite the upgrade options, and the slow reward for grinding through these shifts make this more frustrating than relaxing. I also found the backstories of the spirits you save superficial and lacking in info too. Overall I think the developer was being real ambitious with this game, amount of characters and features, but the execution just isn't polished. Perhaps with more work and updates this can be a stronger game. I also agree with another reviewer that this felt more like an early release than a finished product.

it's a cute concept, and I enjoyed running the bathhouse, but unfortunately the game is just...awkward. there's almost no guidance on systems and mechanics, the minigames are either obtuse or downright impossible, and the only reason to talk to the NPCs is to get them to come work at your bathhouse eventually...except it's almost impossible to get them friendly enough to do that. it needs so much polish that I'm glad it was a gift and not something I bought myself.

I really wanted to like this game, or at least finish playing it before I review it (as I have with all my other reviews), but unfortunately I couldn't do either. I should have listened to the other negative reviews. The gameplay feels repetitive and not that interesting. The UI is clumsy and honestly confusing and hard to manage. I often felt directionless and frustrated. I can enjoy repetition/management in games (Stardew Valley is one of my favorite games of all time), but the bathhouse portion of this game felt disconnected from the rest of the game and meaningless besides being an unfun time-suck. I also disliked the pixel art. I thought it would grow on me -- it did not; it just continues to feel soulless and unpolished. TL;DR I usually like games like this one, but I found it to be unpolished and unfun. I wish I liked it, but I don't. Maybe try the demo first. Sorry.

insanely mediocre cozy game. unpolished without lots of QOL. Map is hard to walk through sometimes, especially since there's never anything really going on. get on heavy sale if you have rock bottom expectations.

I have played several games that have been in early access, but I have never played one where I was left with a feeling that the game was catering to players who played it during early access rather than players discovering it for the first time after release. The game often feels like a collection of features and ideas added over time, without considering how a new player would experience the game as a whole. The progression is not well coordinated. Every time you level up, you are told that you will be able to see more spirits, but I never noticed any difference from one level to the next. Sometimes it would take several level-ups before I suddenly received a new quest on the board. Without any clear sense of progression, this felt more misleading than exciting. On the first or second day, you're forcefully introduced to a guy who sells riddles, and it blows my mind that the very first riddle is locked behind a mid-game area. If you are going to introduce a mechanic this early, the first example should be something the player can actually solve. It should show players what kind of experience they can expect rather than introducing a feature they cannot meaningfully engage with yet. There are many other examples of these design choices. For instance, there is a statue that you walk past frequently, and it even has an text prompt when you examine it. However, when you eventually unlock the quest related to this statue in the mid-game, the character who has been following you the entire time says, "I didn't know this was here." You are constantly left with the impression that certain things were added during early access with existing mid- and late-game players in mind, without considering how a fresh player would experience it after full release. The line about the statue would only make sense for players who had experienced an older version of the game before the statue was added. However, for a new player experiencing the full release, it feels completely out of place. The same problem appears with resource gathering. You learn how to fish, forage, catch bugs, and collect various resources long before you unlock any meaningful way to use or sell them. I had no idea whether these items would ever become useful or if I ever would unlock the ability to sell them, so I had no choice but to hoard a large amount of stuff that had no immediate purpose. The game also does a poor job of explaining why certain items matter or why you should bother collecting them. Once again, it was not until the mid-game that I was introduced to a special "shop" where I could finally spend these resources. This felt like another example of content that was added later and immediately made sense for players who had already followed the game's development, but not for someone starting fresh, not knowing whether there would ever be a store or any use for these items. To nitpick a bit, this highlights the issue of adding more content instead of fine-tuning the existing systems. You can befriend townsfolk through various activities, including a typical rhythm game. I assume the better your score, the more friendship points you earn. However, you can simply spam the corresponding button and the game will still register the inputs as successful hits. It does not matter whether you actually follow the rhythm or not. Beyond the design issues, I also encountered technical problems. I managed to get soft-locked on the second day and had to restart the entire day. I have also experienced crashes that forced me to replay a full day. There are additionally some texture and overlay issues where, in certain areas, the UI appears behind the environment. I have not even started talking about managing the bathhouse itself, but all I can say is that it is extremely slow. You spend most of your time waiting for a guest to enter or for someone to leave so you can free up space for another guest. There are some small tasks you can do to fill the downtime, but they mostly feel like tedious busywork rather than meaningful activities. The income is also laughable once you realize that you can make far more money by simply creating bath soap and selling it. This makes the actual management of the bathhouse feel unrewarding and undermines the entire premise of running one. I love the premise of running something (a bathhouse in this case) while solving puzzles, riddles, and quests outside and around a town. Sadly, this game doesn't do it well, and I hope someone takes this concept and expands on it.

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)

This game is almost maliciously designed to be confusing and obtuse. In addition to an absolutely terrible map and NPC "locator" there's just so much of this experience that is just confusing. Add to that that a lot of the time tending the baths at least at the start is just waiting for guests to leave because no space. Yes, you have two other tasks that can be done, but they don't take much time. I refunded the moment I got a letter from Julio talking about wanting fish and all all that "you know how to fish, right" so I figured go talk to him to get that quest. No, you just magically meant to know one of the shops sells a fishing rod that you can just buy to learn fishing with no prompting or introduction. It was at that point (roughly) I saw my future playing this game basically with a guide in hand and I said "nope". There's things to like about this, but I can't recommend it. Certainly not for a 30+ hour game.

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.

Really difficult to play on PC without a controller. You're supposed to chase things all over while holding down shift, not toggle shift on/off, hold it down. ESC doesn't close menus, you have to use S to close it. It was tedious. Too bad, the general idea seems good.