Spiritstead: we farmed FarmVille through our student years, and this one removes precisely what used to drag us back

The art direction first, because that is what stops your eye: a hand-drawn style, openly claimed as inspired by Miyazaki films and the cartoons of our childhood. It is lovely, and it does not cheat with a cozy filter slapped over three cubes. There is a real hand behind it.

Then the confession: it stirs up memories of student years spent farming FarmVille as a couple. Plenty of people lived that, and plenty also know what that game was really doing. FarmVille did not hold you through its depth, it held you through timers, crops that rotted if you did not come back on schedule, and constant social pressure to recruit your friends. It was an obligation machine dressed up as a farm.

Hence the real question put to Spiritstead: what does it bring that is new?

One clarification first: this is not a farm manager

A necessary correction, because the banner can mislead. Spiritstead is not an agriculture simulator, it is a village city builder. You take in residents, build them homes, assign them jobs, meet their needs and lift their spirits with cafes, markets and bonfires. The farm is just one building among others.

It is not huge either, and that is not a criticism: it is the debut game from Turbo Dog Games, sold at around ten dollars, and it states itself that it runs six to eight hours end to end. The world also stays the same from one playthrough to the next. Worth knowing before you buy.

What it actually brings: the spirits

Here is the answer to the question. The centre of the proposition is the spirits you discover by interacting with the world. Once found, they are not decoration: they care for villagers, run parts of the town and automate everyday tasks. You even build dedicated buildings for them.

And that is the exact inverse of the FarmVille model. Where the Facebook game forced you to come back and click or lose everything, Spiritstead hands the chore to creatures and lets you leave. There is even a creative mode with no pressure at all, alongside an adventure mode that does ask you to manage residents' needs. Under the gentle layer there is a thread: territories to open with the help of wandering spirits, hidden secrets, and a Grand Spirit Sanctuary to restore in order to bring back balance between spirits and humans.

The reservations

They match the scale of the project. A cozy city builder of six to eight hours, with a world that does not change between runs, will not be replayed endlessly whatever the store page claims. And the studio openly includes clicker elements, which will need to stay a tactile pleasure rather than turn back into the very chore we were trying to escape.

But at that price, with that hand-drawn look, and with spirits doing the thankless work for you, the proposition is honest. It is the farming of our twenties with the leash taken off. Available today on PC.