Very beautiful, very peaceful: Worlds Upon the Wind
A game I've been enjoying a lot in its demo form just officially released on Steam this morning, and I would really encourage folks who like relaxed, charming games to check it out.
The most striking first impression is the art: rather than Japanese anime, it takes its inspiration from the classic Japanese style of ink painting. The whole thing from maps to icons is just gorgeous. It's by a solo developer, and you can really feel the love he poured into it. Some of the art actually is taken from historic prints, but most was hand-drawn by the dev in the same style.
You are exploring a world broken up into little islands floating in a sea of mists. As you travel from one to the other you start villages that grow into towns, and you'll later return to help those settlements resolve their growing pains, settling conflicts and guiding development. Meanwhile, hints of a lost civilization are there to be discovered.
The gameplay is simplicity itself at first: you will be presented with tasks that require certain glyph-symbols to accomplish. Spend a glyph on an option in an event, and you get the matching reward. But as you go further into the game and the number of islands you can travel to grows, quite a bit of depth emerges in the choices you have to make about where to spend your resources and how.
There are no characters like in an RPG, but the game never loses sight of the human scale -- you're not just building and developing like in a strategy game, you're part of the small, personal events in the lives of your townspeople.
I've only played the demo, and the game is apparently about 20 hours long, so there's lots I haven't discovered -- apparently you can choose an animal companion later on, and there are "hauntings" that I haven't yet encountered.
Anyway, it's ten bucks, it's a little different from the usual cozy fare, and it's lovely. Have a look.