My Time At Evershine has been announced, with a kickstarter campaign launching September 24th. This time around you are the governor of a town, so anticipate increased city building elements that build off from the previous building elements of the other games - the team is budgeting $12mil for the title, and the kickstarter will help determine what amount of funding beyond that the game will receive, so that they don't have to guess when planning out development:
It's the third game in the series after Sandrock and Portia, very easy to sink hundreds of hours over multiple playthroughs, and because I have three-digit hours across both games myself I am perfectly fine in recommending the crowdfund campaign. For any chuubas that are interested in the game (namely Shiori and Sayu come to mind), they might want to consider watching the backer NPC slots like a hawk because those are often the most popular tiers in their campaigns.
The developers also have a built-in controversy surrounding the game because the lead artist used an AI tool to create wrinkles on characters in promotional artwork for My Time At Evershine, and (from what I currently understand but could be wrong about) also used an AI tool to prototype character concepts before fully drawing the characters themselves, which put a vocal chunk of the "cozy games audience" in a frenzy. The developers have already apologized and offered additional character previews to showcase "this isn't made by AI, the artist draws everything", which was met with "not good enough sweaty", but I'm willing to bet that won't have much sway over the crowdfund at the end of the day.
While i dont Back games on purpose, i do look forward to it as Portia and Sandrock were really enjoyable.