Spirit City: Lofi Sessions releases a new Cozy Kitchens DLC to help with your food preparation productivity

If you’re already bought in to the concept of one of our most played games of 2024 (and secret productivity lifehack) Spirit City: Lofi Sessions, the new Cozy Kitchen DLC will offer you more of the same, and then some.

Tons of new options for customization (including color choices!)

The new Kitchen space offers a ton of options for customization, including new texture maps for almost every item in the DLC where you can change things to be any color you’d like, either by selecting chips, moving the tooltip on a gradient map, or even just adding a hex code if you really want to get precise. In addition to DLC items, this color customizing option also includes some new clothing options and flooring options in the main space. We hope to see this functionality added to the base game over time as well.

However, sometimes changing the look or color of an item isn’t always straightforward. Things like the lids of canisters in the backdrop can be changed by swapping the color of the oven mitts over the stove — which couldn’t be changed on all the items in that slot when we reviewed it. And even with all this choice, there are still odd omissions — still can’t change that laptop color! — and you can make your hanging plant a lovely fuchsia or chartreuse, you can’t make the pots any color but brown. Plus, the Lighting shader changes can really mess up how the undertones interact, even more so than they used to.

Expect to take some time experimenting (we advise you to use that pomodoro timer so you don’t get too distracted).

New spirits and sounds sweeten the deal

One of the highlights of this DLC is definitely the spirits. The three new spirits all have a ton of personality, and the makeovers for the DLC variant spirits are adorable too. Many spirits have additional animations in the kitchen space with certain activities, like Arachknit has a cute extra animation with the whisking motion, and Dust Bunny will clean his button with a tiny sponge at the dishwashing action before dunking it in his tea in the eating action. But some spirits seem a bit left out — Moonpaw mostly just sleeps in the kitchen, even in activities where most other pets will at least read books.

We did note that it took a bit longer to unlock all these new spirits and alt skins than it did to unlock things in the base game, but it isn’t egregious — in fact we felt the initial unlocks were probably a little fast. Our trial period was around four days, and we unlocked all the new spirits in that time.

There’s no new music, but there are several new bubbly, sizzly atmospherics to use that help set the Kitchen vibe. One of our reviewers said parts of the new dishwasher atmospheric over headphones kept making her think her computer fan was spinning out of control.

No real new tools that make this an urgent purchase (but we’re okay with that)

If you’re a user concerned purely with the utility Spirit City offers, this DLC may not be at the top of your list, because it doesn’t add any true tools to the toolkit. The habit tracker, journal, to-do lists, and pomodoro timers are the same as they were in the base game. If you’re a body doubling user, you’ll get utility out of the new actions — dishwashing is sure to enter our chore rotation. But we like that this DLC just seems like a fun boost to what we already have in a game we already find to be a valuable asset in our productivity toolkit, rather than an ultra-necessary business expense to claw back functionality.

However, it would’ve been very on theme to add an additional kitchen timer we could use to time the banana bread we meal prepped alongside our Bentobunny.

Disclaimer: Spirit City furnished us with the Cozy Kitchen DLC to complete this review.