Like Going To The Office In Animal Crossing: My Most Productive...

Some people have a great fondness for working in an office. I am not one of them; I consider normalizing work from home the only silver lining of Covid-19. When the pandemic initially sent entire corporate industries home, there was a flurry of experimentation in using games not just as hangout spaces, but online meeting rooms too. Some people even had meetings in Red Dead Online.

That energy for makeshift avatar office culture didn't really last, and I've felt a lingering loneliness in working from home even though I prefer it to a commute. Trends like body-doubling haven't caught my interest, but what has grabbed me by the throat and not let go is an adorable "cozy multiplayer productivity game" called On-Together that's made my work week 100% more social and more productive.

Imagine turning Animal Crossing into a coworking space—that's basically On-Together. It's unabashedly cozy game-core with chibi avatars, a pastel color palette, and little minigames like fishing and basketball. You can host or join a session with up to 16 players on its open world island map stuffed with cute study spots to share with friends and coworkers. Snag a table in the open-air library or a picnic table or a corner of a cafe and go into "focus mode" to make your character write, draw, read, game, listen to music; there are all sorts of cute little animations that may reflect what you're working on at your real-life desk for the day.

On-Together also has a suite of productivity tools: a to-do list, task-planner, journal with a mood tracker, and a Pomodoro Technique timer—a time management method of 25 minute task sprints broken up by short breaks—that more grindset-minded work-from-home champs than me are already well-versed in. I've never been a Pomodoro person but On-Together makes it so dang catchy to get into.

Everyone's avatar shows their current timer countdown over their head, indicating whether they're on break time or focus time. The overlay automatically flows through focus and break sessions with customizable audio cues telling you when to switch modes. Every day for a week I've logged on to sit at a digital desk with my pals, syncing up our Pomodoro timers so we can take little breaks to fish and shoot hoops before getting back to work. Somehow being in an online chat room with my friends is the least distracted I've been during my workday in months.

The catchiest part of On-Together is its different display modes. You can snap a reduced view to the side or b

Source: PC Gamer