Yuzu Onsen Capybaras

Seven capybaras live at the shop, each with a personality of its own, and they get on with their day whether you help or not: napping, eating, paddling among the pool floats, soaking in the hot spring and sunbathing in the yard, with a little icon overhead to show how each one feels. Feed them, pat them, name them and dress them up while customers drop in, pay and leave their stars.

Step out of the door and there’s a whole town. Thirteen townsfolk keep days of their own, each with tastes, a birthday, letters and stories that unfold as you become friends, and six neighbors on Pine Lantern Street have stories too. There’s a garden to grow, a forest to forage and fish in, a notice board of requests, an old bathhouse to bring back to life, and a book of wishes that changes the town as you fill it: a ropeway up the mountain, a footbath by the square, an old inn reopened, a stage for the festivals.

Each of the four seasons has its own look, weather, crops, fish, recipes and sounds, and the townsfolk dress for each one. Every week brings a festival, sixteen in all:

• Winter: Snow Lantern Night, a capybara fashion show, a yuzu bath and New Year’s Eve.
• Spring: a doll festival on the stream, a blossom picnic, a spring fair with goldfish scooping, and a capybara race on Children’s Day.
• Summer: Tanabata wishes, blindfolded watermelon splitting, fireworks over the pond and paper lanterns on the stream.
• Autumn: moon viewing, catching falling leaves, a harvest festival with a prize for the finest vegetable, and a sweet-potato bonfire.

From the second year there is more: a rare seed at the co-op each season, a legendary fish each season in the pond or the lake, something new at every festival, and new stories for the neighbors.

Under the mountain shrine, the old spring keepers’ tunnels go down thirty floors to the source of the town’s hot water. You knock open rocks with a little hammer for ore, crystals and fossils, find each ladder by its wisp of steam, ride the steam lifts and fish the underground pools. There are no monsters: just the warm dark and your lantern.

A spin-off app puts one of the shop’s capybaras on your desktop. It ambles along the bottom of the screen by itself; move the pointer over it for a toolbar to give it a snack, run it a hot bath, set out a paddling pool, put it down for a nap or dress it up from the shop’s wardrobe. Each of the seven capybaras moves in its own way, and the shy one shrinks back at first. For macOS and Windows.

Play the first winter free in your browser, on a computer or a phone: 28 days and all four winter festivals, with keyboard and mouse, touch or a controller, in English or Simplified Chinese. A desktop version with 20 achievements is coming to Steam.

Development led by Xinyue (Lily) Feng with AI tools: the code was written with Claude Code, the pixel art generated with AI image tools and the text written with the help of an AI language model. The music and sound effects are synthesized by the game as you play.

Pixel font: Fusion Pixel Font by TakWolf.