The Quest To Revive A Summer Festival Is Off To A Strong Start In Danchi Days
Won’t you be my neighbor?
Cozy games tend to focus on idyllic settings, like romanticized versions of small towns and rural farms. You won’t find too many set in huge, run-down apartment complexes, for instance. But one fascinating upcoming game finds the joy in exactly that setting, and as rare as it is, that’s one of the least surprising things about it.
Danchi Days is the first collaboration between its three-person development team, which includes Melos Han-Tani of Analgesic Productions, the studio that’s also publishing the game. It’s set in a danchi, a large-scale Japanese housing complex, with crumbling walls and an aging population. You play as Hoshino, a young girl who moves back to the danchi so her father can take care of his mother with dementia, after moving to the U.S. for work years prior. The game revolves around Hoshino’s attempt to revive the dormant summer festival, which her grandma was in charge of in her youth. Danchi Days isn’t set to release until next year, but it’s slated to reveal more details at the upcoming Wholesome Direct showcase on June 7.
Danchi Days is a strange, hilarious game about reviving a long-forgotten summer festival.
While Danchi Days is blunt about both Hoshino’s grandmother’s dementia and the dire state of the danchi, it’s ultimately an extremely upbeat game. Hoshino is bright-eyed and exuberant, flinging herself into her festival duties with no hesitation. Her goal — and yours — is to get as many neighbors as possible to RSVP to the festival and bring a sense of life and community back to the crumbling housing complex.
Armed with a stack of flyers, Hoshino sets out to the nearby water tower to ceremonially invite the god of the danchi, and ends up meeting Moro-Q, a kappa with a slice of melon bread on his head. As you may be piecing together, Danchi Days is a bit of an odd game, but at least in the hour or so I’ve played, an endlessly charming one.
Just as unorthodox as the game’s story is how it actually plays. Hoshino’s most important skill is sensing, a sort of mundane superpower that’s literally just about opening her sense to the world around her. In gameplay terms, this means playing a lot of bizarre minigames. These games are all based on moving around a grid, collecting anything from musical notes to water droplets to sense birdsong, the condensation on a cup of tea, or the heat of a playground slide in the summer sun. The games themselves often feel more chaotic than strategic, but they’re an adorable way of representing Hoshino paying close attention to the world around her, and succeeding at one usually lets her get closer to her neighbors and invite them to the summer festival.
Hoshino’s quest to throw a summer festival gives her a chance to meet all her charming neighbors.
While most of her neighbors need to be handed a flyer in person to agree to show up at the festival, the internet also plays a big part in Danchi Days. Equipped with a handheld computer, Hoshino makes her own webpage about the festival, and frequently visits the pages of her neighbors and exchanges emails with them. Connecting with neighbors online will convince some to come to the party, but Danchi Days’ nostalgic view of the Geocities era of the internet is worth poking around on just for the sincere charm of visiting pages dedicated to the joy of bamboo brooms or an intense loathing for mosquitoes. Hoshino also finds her nemesis in another internet user who posts mocking screeds about the danchi and its upcoming festival, and dedicates herself to proving them wrong.
There’s a lot of nostalgia in Danchi Days, with characters opining on the good old days and some sequences that transport Hoshino back in time to see the apartment in all its glory. But at least in its preview, it avoids falling into paralyzing fantasies that things were just better back then and there’s nothing we can do about it. In confronting Hoshino’s attempt to connect with her grandmother despite her dementia, it shows the dark side of the passing of time but suggests that the lesson to learn from the cheerfully remembered past is to form bonds with the people around us here and now.
