The Animal Crossing-like cozy life sim Heartopia is among the greatest new video games on Steam this month. It’s additionally made with AI-generated content material in response to a brand new disclosure by the builders.
Heartopia is developer and writer XD Worldwide’s reply to the query, “What if Animal Crossing was a chibi anime?” It dropped on January 17 following a wave of closed betas in each November and December 2025. Concurrent gamers peaked at over 35,000.
Evaluations have been combined, although. It presently sits at solely a 66 % optimistic score on Steam. And most of the adverse responses from gamers on Valve’s platform are taking challenge with the developer not disclosing their use of AI-generated paintings in Heartopia.
“This game contains Generative AI (used to generate the puzzles), which they didn’t disclose until the accusations of it surfaced,” writes consumer parupa206. Using AI wasn’t made public till GAMINGbible’s Richard Breslin emailed Heartopia’s UK PR group earlier this week. A press release from the developer appeared on Discord not that lengthy after.
“Monetization Content in Heartopia does not include AI-generated materials,” learn a part of the message to followers. “Should any AI-assisted content be used in the game in the future, it will be announced in advance. Marketing materials produced outside the game, including those created in collaboration with third-party suppliers, are not covered by the scope of this disclosure.”
Since then, Heartopia’s Steam web page has been up to date to incorporate a newly added “AI Generated Content Disclosure” part, which states that “AI is used in the puzzle gameplay to reinterpret and redraw in-game snapshot images” and that AI can be “used in in-game chat to help players understand different languages.”
The devs have seemingly not apologized for not disclosing their use of AI-generated belongings on Steam in any of the official Heartopia channels that I may discover, and, given how blatantly obvious its utilization seems to be in its puzzle minigame, I’m unsure how they ever thought they’d get away with not disclosing this within the first place.
