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Students, busy-bodies, stoners, and gamers have been chilling at their desks with Lofi Girl - the YouTube channel featuring lofi beats and a studious anime girl - for almost a decade. One Steam Next Fest demo now makes that experience kind of playable with a life sim that's perfect for serial procrastinators.
Spirit City: Lofi Sessions is described as a "gamified focus tool" that serves the same purpose as Lofi Girl: it gives you a cute digital companion to be productive with. The demo is full of the same downtempo music and warm colors as the YouTube channel, but you're in control this time.
From the get-go, you're plopped into a cozy room and given control of a few knobs. For starters, you can create an avatar, customizing their hair, clothes, accessories, and even their horns, which is basically the cooler version of giving anime characters cat ears.
After that, you're essentially free to mod your own version of the Lofi Girl channel. You can choose a variety of playlists, toggle ambient sounds like rainfall, adjust the time of day, and place the avatar anywhere in the room, from the perennial favorite desk to a fireside couch. Then, you simply enjoy the ambiance you've created. Again, it captures the joy that made Lofi Girl a hit with almost 14 million subscribers - only this time, it's moddable.
My favorite thing about Spirit City is how it ties into the day-to-day desk tasks you're hunching over for. The game provides a timer, a to-do list, a full-fledged journal, and a section called "Habits" that wasn't available in the demo, but I'm sure it'll finally nudge me to get through my daily Duolingo lessons, right?
Despite all the helpful productivity tools on offer, Spirit City never feels like it's pressuring you to be productive. The life sim instead welcomes you to simply chill. Sit down. Tick off some goals. Decorate the room. Or don't. Vibe instead. Even writing this very article here for you, dear reader, was an infinitely easier experience thanks to this thingymajig.
I made my avatar read a book next to the window, mouse spirit pet at his feet. I set a 30-minute timer. I ordered night to fall over my digital bedroom. I sat down, tapped away in some kind of blissful trance, and voila. I opened the "To-Do" tab and ticked one off. And, as a serial procrastinator myself, I can't wait for Spirit City to become a mainstay in my desk-bound hours when it launches on April 8 via Steam.
Steam Next Fest is as good as ever with demos for huge survival games, chaotic platformers, wobbly-physics farming sims.
