For someone who honestly never got very far in Stardew Valley, I would never have thought another cozy game like Acornia Mirror Worlds would totally rope me in and make me want more. Between selling sweet treats and battling corrupted creatures in another dimension, I found this game seriously addicting.
Acornia Mirror Worlds is a cute adventure game with tons of extra features like farming, crafting, shop management, and town building. This delightful world was developed by Splashteam, who also made Tinykin, another game with a similar style of 2D characters inhabiting a vast and detailed 3D world. We gave Tinykin a 9/10 back when it came out, and several years later I’m pretty confident we have another absolute gem from Splashteam on our hands.
You step into the world of Acornia as Alva, a squirrel girl from a village built on the Great Tree. After the village was ruined in a disaster some time ago, it’s now up to Alva to help restore her home and its people. Along the way, you’ll meet tons of cute and colourful characters that will aid Alva’s quest, like Roncel the travelling mouse merchant and Selene the general store owner. Alva will also need to make frequent trips to the Duramen, a strange parallel dimension that is home to corrupted monsters.
To rebuild, you will need to reconstruct the town using materials throughout the game world. Alva has the special ability to suck up and spit out just about any item in the game, which can be used in Alva’s dimension to pull fruits and vegetables from trees and farmland. In the Duramen, Alva can find broken pots, boxes, and other breakables she can use to gather resources like wood and stone.
Rebuilding isn’t just about collecting materials, as Alva needs to pay her carpenter aunt Hona for the construction jobs. To make enough Golden Acorn coins, Alva will need to run her family shop, preparing all sorts of goods for the villagers of the Great Tree to enjoy. You can sell items as simple as the cherries and pistachios growing around the village, or something more involved, like cherry jam, carrot and orange mousse, or kasutera sponge cake.
One of the main things to consider during gameplay is Acornia‘s time cycle. Every in-game day lasts 18 minutes from 6 a.m. to midnight, and certain services can’t be used at certain times, like how the general store is only open until 6 p.m., or how a flower festival occurs from Spring 13 – 14. I usually started each day by checking up on my crops and the cherry and pistachio trees around the village, then buying enough sugar to make cherry jam and caramel pistachios out of what I gathered that day. I waited until around 9 p.m. to sell those, and spent the time in between shifting into the Duramen and starting to fight monsters.
To defeat the enemies in the Duramen, Alva can spit nearly any item at them to deal damage. Destroying an enemy rewards you with a material based on their type, like living stone creatures crumbling into more stone. Combat is simple early on, but bosses and ranged enemies combined with bigger hordes can make for some tight situations for Alva. Every item in the game also has a power value, so crafting more expensive goods for their higher power can be a huge plus when you encounter tougher foes that need a little more oomph.
Combat isn’t just about grinding for more materials either, as every once in a while a recipe will drop from a defeated enemy. My completionist brain would spike every time I saw a new recipe added to my collection, so I’d scatter to Alva’s shop to get cooking right away. It didn’t matter to me if one item sold better than another; I still found it super fun to make at least one of everything I came across.
I love the gameplay loop of Alva’s day-to-day life. In a game like Stardew Valley, I usually feel restricted to doing certain things every day, and that I’m always working against the clock. Acornia‘s days may have a time limit, but there’s such an amazing balance of every feature the game world has to offer that it always feels like you’re making great progress.
I’m super happy with how much Acornia just lets you just play the way you want. Want to run a simple shop with just cherry jam and caramel pistachios? You can make some crazy money just doing that. Want to turn Alva’s shop into a variety asian restaurant with goods like bánh cam, hwajeon, and bibingka? You can absolutely do that. If you make enough money and figure out your favourite shop identity, you could even skip the Duramen for a while and focus on making a thriving and diverse treat shop for your fellow villagers.
I only got a short peek at the full list of items you can craft in Acornia, but I’m already excited to see where else Splashteam will go with the recipes. The combat also has tons of potential too, as I know there are dungeon-like challenges in store later on in Alva’s quest, and I’m interested to see how necessary using expensive and powerful goods will be for the later combat encounters.
Acornia Mirror Worlds still impresses me with how addicting I find its core gameplay loop. I’m definitely excited for the full release so I can continue Alva’s adventures, especially since the preview build I got ahold of only featured around two weeks of in-game time. The world-building is super neat, and I’d love to learn more about the Great Tree and the people who live in its village.
