Hokko Spaces Launches, Letting a Tiny London Studio Build on Hokko Life's Cosy World

A studio you could fit around a single kitchen table just shipped a second game. Wonderscope Games, the self-described "super tiny" London studio behind the 2022 life sim Hokko Life, released Hokko Spaces on October 29 for PC via Steam and Nintendo Switch, published once again by Team17. It is not a sequel so much as a spin-off: instead of running a village and chatting up neighbors, Hokko Spaces hands players a toybox of blocks, furniture and critters and asks them to build something to look at rather than something to manage.

From running a village to building a diorama

Hokko Life put players in charge of reviving a sleepy animal town, mixing crafting, decorating and light simulation into something regularly compared to Animal Crossing. Hokko Spaces strips most of that structure away. There is no shop to stock, no debt to pay off and no townsfolk to keep happy with daily errands. Players instead shape a single scene at a time, laying down terrain blocks and dressing it with furniture, then letting a handful of animal visitors wander in once the space gives them a reason to.

It is a smaller, calmer idea than its predecessor, closer to a digital diorama kit than a life sim, and that scope shows in the price: Hokko Spaces sells for £7.99 / $7.99 / €7.99, a fraction of most full releases in its own genre.

What's actually in the box

The feature list reads like a long afternoon of fiddling rather than a checklist of systems. Builders get more than 300 decorative items, from campfires and garden benches to picnic baskets and picket fences, plus five block types, including stone cobbles, grass and sand, for shaping the ground itself. Four seasons and two weather states per season let the same plot of land look like a sun-bleached summer yard one moment and a frost-dusted clearing the next.

• Over 300 placeable decorative items
• Five terrain block types for shaping each space
• Four seasons, each with two weather options
• 26 animal residents, unlocked through simple goals like clearing weeds
• A built-in Photo Mode for sharing finished dioramas

Twenty-six animal residents can move into a finished space once small conditions are met, such as clearing a set number of weeds, giving the sandbox a light sense of progression without turning it into a checklist game. A Photo Mode rounds out the package, aimed squarely at players who want to screenshot their work rather than simply build and move on.

A beach pack and a bundle for the committed

Alongside the base game, Wonderscope and Team17 released Lei's Beachside Pack, a $1.99 add-on that introduces a new villager named Lei along with beach-themed decorations like rubber rings, a lifeguard's chair and a boombox. Players who want both from day one can pick up the Hokko Spaces: Sunshine Edition, which bundles the base game and the DLC for $8.99, a small discount against buying the two separately.

None of this is positioned as a live-service roadmap. Hokko Spaces reads like a complete, self-contained toy rather than the first chapter of a bigger plan, which fits a developer whose entire studio could sit at one table and still have room for lunch.

A tiny studio's second swing

Wonderscope Games is built around one name: Robert Tatnell, an indie developer who built Hokko Life largely solo before Team17 picked it up for publishing in 2020. That first game spent roughly a year in Early Access, growing its simulation systems with community feedback before its full 2022 launch on PC and consoles. Hokko Spaces leans on the same cosy visual identity and the same cast of furry neighbors, but trades the life-sim scaffolding for something closer to a sandbox toy, a pragmatic way for a studio this size to put out a second project without repeating a multi-year development cycle.

That approach also makes Hokko Spaces a useful test of whether Hokko Life's audience sticks around for a spin-off with fewer systems attached. The core ingredients are the same: a soft color palette, round-eyed animal characters and zero pressure to optimize anything, just reassembled around decorating instead of managing.

Where to find it

Hokko Spaces is available now on Steam and the Nintendo Switch eShop, with Switch 2 compatibility supported through backward play. For background on the original game that set the template, Hokko Life's history is covered on its Wikipedia page. Anyone curious whether a $7.99 sandbox can hold their attention without a single chore attached to it now has a cheap, quick way to find out.