Spirittea

Spirittea is a cozy life-simulation game in the same vein as Harvest Moon. You are a new arrival in a small town. There, you befriend the locals and enjoy small town life. Only in this game, rather than farming for money, you run a bathhouse, a bathhouse for spirits! This town is a vaguely fantasy Japan inspired place where ancient spirits live. Only modern day people don’t leave tributes for them anymore leading to them becoming mischievous and mean. By going to the bathhouse, they can remember who they once were and how they help people.

Find it on Steam.

In an interesting tweak to the game formula, you are actually not permanently moving to town. You are only there for a change of scenery to write a book. When you are done with the book, you have the option of leaving the town, even if there are lots of other things left undone. It is by chance that you are given the house of the previous speaker, the person that can talk to spirits. You also gain that ability, and the spirit living in your house asks you to start running the bathhouse again to help spirits.

The small town is a fun place. Note that I am calling it small town because you can name the place yourself. No one locks their doors so you can go in and out of people’s houses as you want. Though most of the inhabitants actually live in an apartment. The place is an interesting blend of small town and modern living. There is a karaoke bar around, and a full school with lots of teachers and classrooms. The town isn’t that isolated. Buses come frequently and probably the next town over is right past the edge of the map. We just don’t get to go there.

There are many different kinds of townspeople to meet and befriend. There is no romance in the game. And becoming better friends with townspeople won’t have interaction cutscenes where you learn more about them. Still, if you pay attention and talk to them, you’ll learn quite a bit. If you follow the townspeople around, they will show off a lot of animations like doing yoga, playing cards with friends, watching TV together and more. Also, you can ask them to hang out with you and play minigames, for example, at the karaoke bar. The karaoke minigame is a pretty hard rhythm game, though.

I think the game could have done more overall, though. Even something as small as changing the townspeople response to finding out spirits have been messing with them based on whether or not you are good enough friends with them to tell them about the spirit stuff. Also, for having an eastern setting to the town, there aren’t any events or holidays. Each day is pretty much the same as the last.

Over the course of the game, you’ll find lots of spirits causing trouble. Typically, they’ll be bothering one of the townspeople. You’ll have to solve the spirit’s problem before you can invite them to the bathhouse. Some of them are as simple as talking to the spirit. Later on, things get more involved such as needing to be at the right place at the right time. Things can be pretty vague, though you can ask your spirit guide for a hint.

Your spirit guide is a fun character himself. His best solution for troublemaking spirits? Beating them into submission.

Now what about the running the bathhouse part of the game? Overall it is pretty simple. You need to have clean towels ready for guests, and you bring them to a free spot in the public baths. Different spirits have different sizes, and some spirits don’t like sitting next to each other, so there is some consideration. Then once the spirits are done soaking, you need to wash and dry the towels for the next guest. There is a large variety of spirits all with fun designs. Some have different behaviors as well, such as being three spirits stacked on top of another. They will spread out when they go into the baths.

And after you become good friends with the townspeople, you can ask them to help you. Once your bathhouse is fully staffed, it really becomes more you putting spirits in the pool and then just waiting around until they are finished. You can spend that time cooking meals for spirits or giving them backscratches, but it is mainly just watching the spirits soak. You get to decide how long you want to open for, though.

That means the game lacks interactivity for a good chunk of the day. With helpers, running a bathhouse becomes mostly waiting. Unlike farming games where you can go off and let the plants grow, here, you need to be inside the bathhouse while it is operational. There isn’t a good other source of money, so expect to spend a lot of time in the bathhouse hanging out and waiting even though there are other things you may want to do during the day.

The game also has a clunky user interface. It just feels too slow to do anything. There is no hotbar, so you need to slowly switch items from your backpack. Cooking also requires you slowly finding ingredients and putting them in one at a time. And when shopping, there is no way that I know of to buy more than one item at a time. When it comes to buying ingredients, that leads to a lot of spamming buttons if you want to buy a lot. When you want to interact with something, it will interact with multiple things at once if too many are in the area. Lastly, the use item button and the run button are one and the same. That means if you are holding a usable item, you can’t run.

Spirittea is a decent game with a different premise from other games of the similar type. Running a bathhouse feels a bit low on things to do when you get it staffed up. The game has a nice eastern aesthetic and philosophy going on, however it doesn’t do too much with it. Meeting new spirits is fun and sometimes challenging. And the town is a calming place to hang around when spirits aren’t causing trouble.

Find it on Steam.