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 recent Bloomburrow set—and it’s the delight that NEARstudios, a team of former Bethesda, BioWare, and Naughty Dog devs, are hoping to capture in Hawthorn.
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 its X account throughout the last few months, but Hawthorn got its first proper reveal yesterday with a gameplay trailer published on YouTube.
In the trailer, which you can watch above, we can see plenty of familiar life sim elements like farming, cooking, and crafting, but they’re acted out from a Redwall rodent’s perspective. With the aid of recruitable woodland creatures, the mouse player-character plants a farm that gradually produces pumpkins and corn—crops that the mouse is dwarfed by, forcing them to harvest their corn with a two-handed axe like we might chop down a tree.
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 on Steam.
