GamesSurvival & CraftingFormer Bethesda and BioWare devs are making a Stardew-like with Redwall animals, and oh my god look at this little mouse farmer carry a pumpkinWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesSurvival & CraftingFormer Bethesda and BioWare devs are making a Stardew-like with Redwall animals, and oh my god look at this little mouse farmer carry a pumpkinWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Nothing soothes the soul like a little woodland creature acting like it’s people. If you’re suffering from a midweek slump, try it yourself: Imagine a mouse. Now imagine he’s got little clothes and he’s sipping a tiny mouse soup from an acorn cap. Good, yeah? It’s the infallible logic behind the success of Frog and Toad, Redwall, Magic’s recentBloomburrowset—and it’s the delight thatNEARstudios, a team of former Bethesda, BioWare, and Naughty Dog devs, are hoping to capture inHawthorn.
Hawthorn is NEARstudios' upcoming life sim and sandbox RPG, featuring anthropomorphic woodland animals working to rebuild an abandoned trading post into a functioning village for little owls with hats and otters who drink tiny cups of rodent ale. The studio has been posting short glimpses of early development gameplay on itsX accountthroughout the last few months, but Hawthorn got its first proper reveal yesterday with a gameplay trailerpublished on YouTube.
Those crops can also apparently be used as decorations, because in a singularly delightful moment we see the mouse dragging along one of their (relatively) massive gourds to place near their house. The mouse is so small, but the pumpkin is so large. Spectacular.
Elsewhere in the trailer, the mouse sets a communal feast for their fellow villagers, where they dance a festive jig with an otter comrade, tiny ale tankards clasped in their little paws. Later, it seems the small folk have invented competitive athletics, as the player mouse climbs onto an owl’s back to join a game of what looks like basketball if basketball let you fly on a bird instead of dribble—a suggested change that the NBA, to its detriment, has repeatedly scorned.
Hawthorn doesn’t have a release date, but you can wishlist it now onSteam.
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