Lofi beats is a genre of music that passed me by until I found some excellent video game lofi beat arrangement albums that I really enjoyed. It turns out, lofi beat music is a whole phenomena to help students study, relax or sleep. Unobtrusive and laid back yet rhythmic, its often associated with enhancing your focus. Spirit City Lofi Sessions leans into this with a cozy vibe, cute spirits to interact with and some beginner friendly task management apps. Its a unique selling point – a cozy focus app that’s been gamified, and in many ways its succeeds.
You start by creating your avatar. Various hair, eyes, glasses, faces, body shapes and clothes are available to make your own pastel and water colour infused vibe. Think lots of baggy clothes, clean and chunky colour palettes and bunny ears for fun and you are most of the day there. You can also do the same with your spirit. These are unlockable and discoverable cute animals or living things that will chill out with you that you can pet and buy customised colour palettes of using the in game currency you receive by levelling up. They are insanely adorable and bring a level of cuddly sass I wasn’t prepared for in a few animations. By extension, your bedroom where the app takes place is also customisable. The floor and walls can be repapered and the furniture can be swapped out. Initially there looks like a lot to swap in and out but mixing and matching often looks quite garish. I ended up sticking with a generally darker theme to make other colours pop.
Once set up, you are into the actual app itself. You can place your avatar on the bed, bean bag, window sill sofa or at the desk. Each area has a few idle animations like reading, knitting, drawing or relaxing. Your spirit sits next to you and falls asleep and you can click them to pet them. The big draw here is setting your ambience and mood. It’s akin to building your own background ASMR soundscape with added graphical bonuses. Sliders for various effects are available like rain, thunder, vinyl popping, fireplace crackling, bbq sizzling or wind blowing. You can turn all of them on, off, or layer them up at different volumes and the room reacts to it. You’ve also got the choice of morning, afternoon, evening and night time lighting too and its beautifully shaded and drawn to feel cosy. If you find those graphical changes distracting, you can go audio only in the settings. Alongside this are a few curated albums from Homework Radio providing lofi music to play. You can also point the music player to an external web player too if you want to tinker. I found the music to be excellently curated but I wished there was a shuffle button so the playlist wasn’t identical each time.
Then you leave the game running whilst you do your real world tasks. As you do, you’ll gain some XP per minute you are working on something alongside bonus XP for daily log ins, completing tasks and doing a timer event. More on those in a minute. The other way to get XP is to discover new spirits in your Spiritdex. Here you’ll find hints like “this spirit likes to play in the rain on a crescent moon”. You need to alter the settings and leave the game alone to coax the spirit to coming forward. Once captured by a click of a button, you can then swap them in and out with your other spirits.
This leads me to the productivity and focus element of Spirit City Lofi Sessions and its here where I may have a couple of future requests. In my day job I manage over 60 staff and run a huge service with nearly 100,000 users. I do advance project management and Spirit City is absolutely not a project management tool. Its designed to be slimline and as hassle free as possible so you commit to its structure through lack of friction. This means its journal is purely a text editor with no styling. This means its task list is just a task title, drag and drop ordering and a done tick. Its very basic and that will work for a lot of people new to this kind of thing. For me, I found the task list lacked the ability to structure anything that was bigger than a job to be done today. There is no task and sub task – which would have made it valuable for tracking larger projects. I also ran into a few bugs where items I’d completed reappeared (still completed) the next day, whereas things I’d not finished vanished at midnight. It was a little inconsistent and I didn’t gel with it nearly as much as the habit feature.
Habits allow you to list habits and have them appear on a daily checklist. I used it for things I have as part of my daily routine. I’m currently caring for two very ill parents so my schedule is topsy turvy and this was a nice way to check all those things I needed to clear daily. Habits were lightweight in a good way whereas tasks felt lightweight in a restrictive way. There is also a timer that you can set to track a focus time period, ring a bell and let you rest for a few minutes before signalling the next bout of work. I must admit, I used this more for the XP gains than its functionality but then my workload means I struggle to have a break at all so maybe I’m my own worst enemy!
My niggles with tasks aside, I do think Spirit City Lofi Sessions offers a unique hybrid focus app and game. The developer has said more things will be added over time as a mixture of free and paid DLC and I think that’s the right approach. The game would benefit from more aesthetic unlocks as you level up to keep you motivated and hooked. However, this is a very solid foundation to build a gorgeous and cozy world to calm and focus the mind.
Review copy provided by publisher. Out now on Steam.
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