This game knows where to take up space and time, and it's a good balance of boredom and distraction that fills up the space in my life that's too often taken up by game objectives and battlepass gacha fomo brainrot. I can tell the music and aesthetics will get old waaaay before I run out of new clothing options to buy, but it's not about that. Spirit City: Lofi Sessions is clearly designed with care and benevolence. All the use I've gotten out of this game was therapeutic, and this is a great vision for the future of this type of app/game.

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I've played a few basic productivity games and some "fun" word processors. I've also played casual and incremental games that eat up all my time and attention instead of being what I want: a game to play when I don't want to play a game, when I want to work on something else but with a game going on in the background. Spirit City: Lofi Sessions is a lot closer to what I need.

First off, The aesthetics are actually good. There's not a ton of variety, but too much could be distracting and counter-intuitive. What's here is good and doesn't force itself on you. There's a few different looping playlists of chill music, and the music player is always in the center of the screen so that it's easy to adjust the volume or add relaxing noise filters like rain sounds. There's a light character creator that exclusively puts out cute doughy LGBT+ anime characters - which is great, what else did you want from this - with some clothing you can unlock by mostly just spending time with the game open. There's also some simple exploration elements where you "discover" new critters around your house by playing with the visual options and tinkering with the ASMR track settings - once you set it up you just have to idle there for a while.

In the meantime there's tools like a checklist, a timer (Pomodoro method), a habit tracker that hasn't clicked with me yet, and a simple journal that I often use for writing when I don't want to look at a word processor. What's nice is that while a few functions award XP, these tools are entirely optional. Even so, they *invite* productivity in a way that's really very novel for a game like this. This game knows where to take up space and time, and it's a good balance of boredom and distraction that fills up the space in my life that's too often taken up by game objectives and battlepass gacha fomo brainrot. I can tell the music and aesthetics will get old waaaay before I run out of new clothing options to buy, but it's not about that. Spirit City: Lofi Sessions is clearly designed with care and benevolence. All the use I've gotten out of this game was therapeutic, and this is a great vision for the future of this type of app/game.

This game knows where to take up space and time, and it's a good balance of boredom and distraction that fills up the space in my life that's too often taken up by game objectives and battlepass gacha fomo brainrot. I can tell the music and aesthetics will get old waaaay before I run out of new clothing options to buy, but it's not about that. Spirit City: Lofi Sessions is clearly designed with care and benevolence. All the use I've gotten out of this game was therapeutic, and this is a great vision for the future of this type of app/game. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've played a few basic productivity games and some "fun" word processors. I've also played casual and incremental games that eat up all my time and attention instead of being what I want: a game to play when I don't want to play a game, when I want to work on something else but with a game going on in the background. Spirit City: Lofi Sessions is a lot closer to what I need. First off, The aesthetics are actually good. There's not a ton of variety, but too much could be distracting and counter-intuitive. What's here is good and doesn't force itself on you. There's a few different looping playlists of chill music, and the music player is always in the center of the screen so that it's easy to adjust the volume or add relaxing noise filters like rain sounds. There's a light character creator that exclusively puts out cute doughy LGBT+ anime characters - which is great, what else did you want from this - with some clothing you can unlock by mostly just spending time with the game open. There's also some simple exploration elements where you "discover" new critters around your house by playing with the visual options and tinkering with the ASMR track settings - once you set it up you just have to idle there for a while. In the meantime there's tools like a checklist, a timer (Pomodoro method), a habit tracker that hasn't clicked with me yet, and a simple journal that I often use for writing when I don't want to look at a word processor. What's nice is that while a few functions award XP, these tools are entirely optional. Even so, they *invite* productivity in a way that's really very novel for a game like this. This game knows where to take up space and time, and it's a good balance of boredom and distraction that fills up the space in my life that's too often taken up by game objectives and battlepass gacha fomo brainrot. I can tell the music and aesthetics will get old waaaay before I run out of new clothing options to buy, but it's not about that. Spirit City: Lofi Sessions is clearly designed with care and benevolence. All the use I've gotten out of this game was therapeutic, and this is a great vision for the future of this type of app/game.