Look, I don’t know what Redwall is. I am not like the Brits working at this website, who grew up reading these British children’s fantasy novels – my country’s colonial overlords brought many cultural artefacts to our little island, but Redwall is not one of them. Well, okay, my partner read them growing up and loved them, but I couldn’t name another person in my life who did.

Nonetheless, Hawthorn’s pitch intrigues me. It’s not actually a Redwall game, but the devs describe it as being inspired by “Victorian-era European fairy tales and the spirit of ‘80s and ‘90s adventure stories featuring anthropomorphic animals”, and I’ve seen enough people cite it as an obvious inspiration that I had to start digging deeper.

Hawthorn comes from NEARstudios, a team made up of developers who have worked on The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Starfield, League of Legends, The Last of Us, Dragon Age, BioShock… the list goes on. You’d probably expect a team with this pedigree to be making a gritty immersive sim or something in the same vein, but that’s not at all what Hawthorn is.

Instead, it’s a life sim and sandbox RPG where you play an anthropomorphic animal and bring an abandoned village back to life. The trailer is almost unbearably cute – it shows us a bunch of tiny houses built against trees, an otter chasing and catching fish in a lake, a mouse felling a crop of corn with a tiny hatchet as if it’s a tree, a cheery crow in a hat, and animals dancing atop tables with a flagon of ale in hand.

According toa Reddit user whoclaims to be a Hawthorn dev, you can play as a mouse, an otter, or an owl.

Mechanics-wise, we see farming, resource collection, crafting, and building – you may even lay out a sumptuous feast on aforementioned tables that you can then devour. It looks like you can also befriend NPCs in your village by chatting with them and catering to their design preferences, and since you can play in co-op, you can hop on a friend playing an owl and have them ferry you places. There’s also seasons and weather in the game, and there’s a brief timelapse of you watching your crops grow in front of your eyes as it rains.

It all feels a little survival-y, which isn’t typically my jam, but this looks more like a friendly, chill vibe than the kind of game where other players kill you on sight, and you’re able to even task your NPC villagers to do the stuff you don’t want to. It’s a nice change of pace. There’s also quite a bit of exploration involved: theSteam descriptionsays that while there are local superstitions surrounding the village, that won’t stop you from “exploring the surrounding wilderness for resources and treasure”, but “the way the woodland shifts and the strange creatures that come and go might make you believe the old legends”.

Hawthorn doesn’t have a release date yet, but fans of life sims might want to keep an eye on this one.