Choose a Steam Next Fest life sim by its play style

Sims Community’s October 2026 Steam Next Fest roundup spotlights eight life sims with different play styles: Loftia pairs cooperative building with farming, Book Nook is a diorama puzzle, and Wish Upon a Llama centers on animal breeding. Steamworks schedules the festival to end October 26, 2026; Sims Community reports a 10 a.m. PT closing time.

Choose the kind of play you want

Build a world with other players

Loftia combines farming, crafting, decorating, exploration, and multiplayer in a world among the clouds. A Qloud Games team member says Early Access was planned for November 3, 2026.

Spirit Crossing focuses on helping spirits in a shared open world. Its activities include fulfilling requests, solving puzzles, playing music, and rebuilding. Logisticats takes a more hands-on building approach: cats farm and construct a settlement on a floating island, then explore the clouds.

Settle in with puzzles, a café, or an unfamiliar world

Book Nook is the quieter option: build miniature cardboard dioramas for virtual bookshelves in a puzzle-like format. Cat Cafe Manager 2: Big City Bliss blends café management and cooking with cat rescue and care, exploration, townsfolk, and a fantasy mystery.

Orion Blue takes fishing into science fiction, with alien fish, boat decoration, and relationships with local characters. Fields of Aaru instead sets its farming and village rebuilding in an Egyptian afterlife, alongside fishing, desert exploration, and ruins.

The Fields of Aaru developer describes a specific irrigation sequence in the demo: repair the water wheel first, then Pentu asks you to fix the shaduf near the dock to water the fields. The update also adds channel digging, villager gifts based on likes and dislikes, and an end-of-day activity summary. Its graphics settings offer Classic and Enhanced modes. Old demo saves do not work with the update, so starting a new game is required.

The developer says controller play is already possible, while compatibility across different configurations is still being refined. One player reported a low, jittery frame rate on their own setup. Separately, the developer pointed players who dislike stepped animation to the “Smoothed” option.

Wish Upon a Llama makes animal breeding a central system

For players drawn to raising animals, Wish Upon a Llama combines breeding and care with relationships and home decoration. Its developer describes 16 animal species, 41 townsfolk, and 21 romanceable characters.

Each animal trait draws from a weighted color pool. It includes two entries for each parent’s color, one for the more dominant parent’s color, and one hand-authored blend, with rare mutations also possible. The developer says each trait uses about 30 named colors. Personality comes from one parent or is fresh in 25% of cases; otherwise, the game chooses between the parents.

Reported release plans and the festival schedule

The developers and Sims Community have reported several release plans. The Loftia team member’s date for Early Access is November 3, 2026. Sims Community lists Spirit Crossing and Cat Cafe Manager 2: Big City Bliss for 2026, Fields of Aaru for November 29, and Orion Blue Early Access for November 25. The Wish Upon a Llama developer describes a planned PC and console release as coming this winter.

Steamworks lists October 26, 2026, as the end date for the October festival. Sims Community gives the closing time as 10 a.m. PT.