While Opening Night Live at Gamescom 2026 gave fans plenty of answers about a range of hotly anticipated titles, Kyle Bosman, host of the ONL pre-show, asked the big question: “What has Splashteam, the developers of Tinykin, been working on?” Seconds later, we had our answer, with the reveal trailer for Acornia: Mirror Worlds, a cute-looking isometric management-adventure game where you serve tasty treats and beatdowns in equal measure. Acornia: Mirror Worlds is currently slated to release in 2027 on PC and consoles.
Thanks to the dev team, we got to go hands-on with an early version of Acornia: Mirror Worlds before the reveal, and after playing for about five hours, I think Splashteam has got the right mix of ingredients to whip up one of next year’s indie darlings.
Check out the Acornia: Mirror Worlds reveal trailer below.
In Acornia: Mirror Worlds, you play as Alva, a young squirrel who has returned from the big city to the tree village of Acornia to reopen her family’s dessert shop. Once a thriving settlement, Acornia lies in ruins, crippled by the influence of the Duramen – a dark mirror dimension inhabited by angry spirits. They tell Alva that the Duramen is filled with negative emotions that feed the tree and is the source of the roots blocking their path up to Acornia. So her only way forward is to travel to the Duramen and destroy them.
Anyone familiar with Tinykin will immediately recognise some of Splashteam’s visual DNA: small 2D cartoon characters in large 3D environments, but Acornia is quite different. It’s a game of two interlocking halves that feed into each other, similar to games like Cult of the Lamb, but it feels distinct due to how the gameplay loop is designed. Alva runs her dessert shop, gathers and buys ingredients, has parts of Acornia repaired, and deals with the locals in the regular dimension, and she battles enemies, destroys progress-blocking roots, and collects crafting resources in the dark dimension, but it’s how she travels between them that is so important.
By shaking the mysterious Mirror Globe, Alva can shift back and forth between the two planes at will. It’s a smooth, seamless transition, with the colourful and more realistic visuals of the normal world replaced by a gloomier version smattered with black shadows. It’s a very clever use of player agency, letting players take the game at their own pace and change what they are doing on the fly without penalty.
Alva is a resourceful squirrel with deep cheekpockets, capable of storing a surprising amount of items and resources, from stacks of wood and stone to jars of preserves, pastries, flavoured teas, and pieces of furniture. She can suck things into her mouth, with larger objects and small enemies filling her cheeks until she spits them back out, all while on the move. I can’t imagine it’s hygienic, but spitting is how Alva gets a lot done, from shooting projectiles at enemies to stacking the shelves and display tables of her shop. Rather than separating gathering and combat into two distinct activities, Acornia makes Alva’s strange ability to hoover up almost anything the foundation of both.
Our heroine wants to restore Acornia to its former glory, so she uses the crafting materials gathered from the Duramen to build kitchen modules for making various recipes and furniture for the shop. A few sets of shelves and display tables are enough to make your shop workable, and then it is up to you to have the right kitchen module and ingredients for the recipes you have. Crafting and cooking recipes can be dropped by enemies, bought from certain shops and merchants, and given as quest rewards, so you quickly have a lot to choose from. This is good, as the variety of goods you sell matters as much as the amount and base cost, making players engage with the gathering/crafting/cooking systems instead of settling for easy but small turnover.
The money you earn is then used to buy ingredients and recipes from shops and merchants, as well as fund repairs around the village. While breaking the roots in the Duramen will remove some blockades, Acornia is in disarray, so bridges will need to be mended to reach other areas, houses must be rebuilt so people will return to the village, and shops must be done up to support businesses. It didn’t take long for me to start making enough coin to begin rebuilding, but I can see a full restoration taking some time.
But there is only so much time in the day in Acornia: Mirror Worlds, quite literally. The game has a clock and is broken up into days and seasons, which measure the passage of time in-game but also create some interesting wrinkles in the gameplay. You have from 6:00 AM to midnight, about 15 minutes, to do what you want each day before Alva has to sleep. Shops also have set opening and closing times, so you’ll have to keep those in mind, and each thing you get repaired will be finished the following day. Seasons dictate what ingredients you can grow and which seeds are available to purchase, so I can see some forward thinking being needed to avoid a bad harvest.
Sleeping isn’t just the end of the day; it is also when you get a breakdown of what you did, from meals prepped to recipes mastered, and how much XP you’ve earned. That XP goes towards raising your Shop Reputation level, the last form of progression in the game, with mainline quests unlocked upon reaching the required level. Each of the game’s systems neatly leads into the other, with your resource gathering helping earn you money, which in turn helps repair Acornia, improving your Shop Reputation level to unlock the next story beat, opening up more of the Great Tree to explore and rebuild.
The Great Tree is a very suitable name, as it is absolutely massive, with the village fully encircling the trunk at various levels and stretching up and out into its vast canopies. Returning Acornia to what it originally looked like is going to be no small undertaking, and while you get a sense of its scale while skating around the fully 3D environment, nowhere is this more apparent than looking at the game’s version of a map. Instead of a flat image, the camera pulls back to reveal the full height of the tree, contained within a glass globe similar to the Mirror Globe in Alva’s possession. Being able to rotate and zoom in on the tree feels very tactile and is definitely the most unique map I have seen in a game for a long time.
For all the time I spent exploring Acornia and the Duramen, there are still plenty of questions I couldn’t answer in my five hours with the game. What exactly is the Duramen, and why is the Great Tree feeding on the negative emotions contained within it? More intriguingly, is Acornia actually contained within a giant snow globe? Hopefully, those questions will be answered as we rebuild Acornia, one slice of pie at a time.
There is still plenty I haven’t seen, but my time with Acornia: Mirror Worlds has left me very impressed. The developers have taken the foundations of a cosy management game and mixed them with exploration, combat, crafting, cooking, and a wonderfully strange dual-world mechanic, with each system feeding neatly into the next. The result is a game that already feels cohesive despite being an early build, and while it’s still too early to say whether Splashteam has nailed the recipe, I’m looking forward to the finished dish next year.
Acornia: Mirror Worlds is slated to release in 2027 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2.
Are you looking forward to Acornia: Mirror Worlds? What games featuring a dual-world system have you enjoyed? Let us know in the comments below, and join the Gamer Social Club Discord to chat about your favourite games, play in community game nights, take part in giveaways, and more!
