Game: Acornia: Mirror Worlds
Developer: Splashteam (Tinykin, Splasher)
Publisher: The Arcade Crew
Genre: Action-Adventure · Shop Management
Release: 2027
Platforms: PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X|S · Switch 2
Revealed At: Opening Night Live
Protagonist: Alva, a squirrel
🐿️ Acornia: Mirror Worlds was revealed during Opening Night Live — a dual-dimension action-adventure shop manager from Splashteam and The Arcade Crew, starring a squirrel who bakes pastries and then fires them at evil spirits. It arrives in 2027.
🧁 The Pastries Are the Ammunition
This is the hook, and it’s a good one. Alva runs a dessert shop in a tree village — and the same cakes and crumbles she sells to customers get stuffed into her cheeks and fired directly at the dark spirits of the Duramen dimension.
It means one kitchen feeds both halves of the game. New recipes make the shop more successful and make Alva more dangerous; growing the business is the same act as arming yourself. Plenty of hybrid games run two parallel systems that never quite touch. Here the product and the weapon are the same object.
Bake it. Stuff your cheeks. Open fire.
Acornia: Mirror Worlds follows Alva, a squirrel who returns home after a long absence to find her village in trouble. The influence of the Duramen dimension has corrupted the place and driven many of its residents away, leaving her with two jobs: keep the family dessert shop running to fund the rebuild, and go into the dark dimension personally to deal with what’s causing it.
It’s from Splashteam — the studio behind Tinykin and Splasher — published by The Arcade Crew, and it was announced during Opening Night Live.
Two Dimensions, Two Genres
🌰 The Village
Run and grow the dessert shop, unlock new recipes, build reputation, welcome customers, farm your own ingredients and rebuild the town with what you earn.
🌑 The Duramen
Descend into dark dungeons, fight the angry spirits that live there, and cleanse the corruption spreading back into your home.
The two halves aren’t just adjacent — they feed each other in both directions. Dungeon progress cleanses the corruption harming the village; shop income funds the rebuild; and the shop’s output is literally what you fight with. That’s a tighter loop than most management-and-adventure hybrids manage.
Employees Solve the Two-Halves Problem
👷 You Can Automate the Shop
Games that split your time between a business and an adventure usually force a choice: every hour in the dungeon is an hour the shop isn’t running.
Acornia’s answer is hiring employees who take on tasks in your stead, automating the dessert shop while Alva is away. Between that and growing your own ingredients through farming, the operation is designed to keep functioning without her.
That’s a sensible structural fix — it means the dungeon half doesn’t feel like it’s costing you the management half, which is exactly where hybrids of this kind usually strain.
🍰 Bake and Sell
Develop new recipes, grow the shop’s reputation and bring in the customers funding everything else.
🌱 Farm Ingredients
Grow and harvest your own produce, because it’s all homemade.
⚔️ Clear Dungeons
Take your stocked cheeks into the Duramen and cleanse the corruption at its source.
🤝 Help the Town
Assist neighbours and celebrate seasonal events — completing tasks makes Alva stronger and the shop better regarded.
And If You Run Out of Cake?
😮 Swallow an Enemy and Fire Them Instead
Splashteam’s fallback for an empty inventory is exactly as ridiculous as the rest of the premise: run out of pastries mid-dungeon and you can swallow an enemy, then use them as ammunition against the next one.
Mechanically it’s a sensible failsafe — nobody wants to be stuck in a dungeon with no way to fight. Thematically, a squirrel resolving a supply shortage by simply eating the problem and repurposing it is entirely in keeping with a character described in the announcement as “a savvy entrepreneur.”
Four Platforms in 2027
🖥️ PC (Steam)
🎮 PlayStation 5
🟩 Xbox Series X|S
🔴 Switch 2
Store pages are already live across Steam, PlayStation and Xbox for anyone wanting to follow it early. Switch 2 appears again — a cosy shop-management adventure with a colourful art style is close to ideal for the platform, which continues to accumulate exactly this sort of announcement.
🏪 Shop Management
⚔️ Action-Adventure
🌱 Farming
🏰 Dungeon Crawler
🐿️ Cosy
🎯 Single-Player
Who’s Making It
🎨 Splashteam
A small team building original games around simple-to-play designs and, in their own words, an undeniable feel-good factor. They’re best known for Tinykin — the well-received 2022 collect-a-thon platformer — and the precision platformer Splasher.
🕹️ The Arcade Crew
A gameplay-first indie publisher whose catalogue includes Abyssus, Drop Duchy, Blazing Chrome and Infernax, with Chivalware and Wardens of Avalon also in development.
Worth noting: The Arcade Crew is Dotemu’s indie publishing division — which makes this the fourth Dotemu-connected title we’ve covered recently, alongside Theos: Cities of Myth, Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Deathmaster and the free shadowdrop Blasterbug: Last Bug Standing!
Splashteam’s back catalogue is the reassuring part here. Tinykin was a genuinely charming, well-built game with a strong sense of place, and a squirrel village threatened by a mirror dimension sounds like exactly the sort of world that team would enjoy making.
Acornia: Mirror Worlds arrives on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2 in 2027.
Hi there! I’m Marie, also known as CtrlQueen. I’m passionate about keeping up with the latest in gaming news and sharing my insights. RPGs steal my heart with their rich narratives and immersive worlds, but I also love unwinding with fun, casual games. Whether you’re here for deep dives into game mechanics or just to chat about your favorite casual game, you’ve found the right place! Let’s game and explore together.
