New Steam co-op open-world RPG that blends cosy gaming, monster hunting, and city builder mechanics attracts nearly 50,000 players in under 3 days after launch
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time launched to Steam on May 21, 2025, and immediately upon release, it managed to garner a significant following of well over 20,000 players. By the end of its first week on Steam, it had peaked at 49,403 concurrent players, according to SteamDB, putting it in third place on SteamDB's recently released top sellers chart for the week and topping the chart for most concurrent players that same week — all despite its $59.99 price tag.
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time gameplay and reviews
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is described by the developer as a "slow life RPG," which is about as adequate a description as can be mustered, since it dips its toes into so many different genres, from the typical JRPG co-op monster hunting and open-world exploration to resource management and colony building, replete with environment manipulation.
The premise of Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is similar to an isekai anime. The game drops players into the shoes of an adventurer who has just arrived at a mystery island and seeks to uncover the island's mysteries. This task takes players 1,000 years into the past, when the civilisation that occupied the island thrived. As players explore the island, they will climb, swim, and ride mounts to get around, and they can switch between 14 different roles or "lives," as they are called in Fantasy Life i. These range from cosy-game stuff, like fishing and resource gathering to crafting, cooking, and researching, all the way to exploring dungeons, solving puzzles, and battling legendary monsters.
Players can also take a bigger-picture approach, settling the island in something akin to a colony sim or city builder, where you can create houses, design your town, and even reshape the landscape to your liking, moving and creating things as fundamental as rivers and roads. Fantasy Life i also supports extensive decoration within the player's abode, with a variety of furniture and decorative elements to make it feel like home.
Graphics in Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time are firmly in the Nintendo-style, low-poly camp, although there is clearly a vision behind the aesthetic, since it fits with the general overarching cosy game theme. Those basic graphics also mean the game is fairly easy to run, with the minimum recommended GPU being an Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti from over a decade ago.
Steam reviews of Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time praise the game for its flexibility and the wealth of satisfying and engaging content available. There is also a lot of praise for how well the different aspects of the game blend together, despite the broad scope. Progression was also mentioned as a strong point for Fantasy Life i, with many saying the progression feels meaningful and rewarding.
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time supports up to four players in online multiplayer mode, but there's also a family-friendly multiplayer mode that allows two players to adventure together in an offline adventure on the same machine. Given the mix of online, offline, and co-op gameplay, and the relatively lightweight minimum requirements and Platinum ProtonDB rating, it seems like the perfect game to take on the run with something like a Steam Deck or Lenovo Legion Go (curr. $699.99 from Lenovo US) or Lenovo Legion Go S (curr. $759.99 from Lenovo US).
