Like going to the office in Animal Crossing: my most productive work-from-home experience this year was spending all day online in this virtual co-working game

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 bottom of your screen or minimize the game so that all you can see is you and your table of friends working together in the corner of your monitor. In a year when desktop pets are so back, I'm now obsessed with turning my friends into my little taskbar companions instead of hanging out with Bongo Cat.

Anyone working corporate probably already has enterprise task-management tools they're required to use (Jira, Asana, Trello, etc) which On-Together can't replace, but no amount of Slack messaging, Google Meet-ing, or Microsoft Teaming can flip the switch in my little monkey brain that says I'm actually near another person the way that On-Together has. There's something about the accountability of knowing my pals are there with me that keeps me on task better than Pomodoro-ing solo ever could.

"On-Together was our reaction to the culture we grew up with," co-developer and character artist Ilgın Saçan tells me. She describes growing up with online chatrooms as a kid of the early 2000s, socializing with people around the world in online playgrounds. It does feel like On-Together is the 'grownup with a job' equivalent of logging on to Guild Wars every night as a teen just to hang around in the hub cities chatting with my friends.

"At the time, I didn’t think of it as intentional, but I was definitely doing a kind of online body-doubling," Saçan says of managing her own work-from-home productivity prior to developing On-Together. "I’d open The Sims not for the gameplay, but for the atmosphere. I’d build a peaceful backyard or a bright little office, then leave my Sim swimming or typing while I worked on my own tasks. Watching my avatar move around gave me this quiet sense of company, like someone else was sharing the space with me."

Saçan doesn't seem to miss office life any more than I do, lamenting the mental and logistical demands of going and sitting at your assigned desk. "Being aligned in mindset and intention can exist anywhere without physical boundaries," she says. "Not every work-from-home situation has to feel like a battle against loneliness."

I'm pretty well suited mentally for the work-from-home life, but even I've found a lot of extra joy in the socializing that On-Together has given me. I'd never have poked a coworker in their Slack DMs just to natter before. On-Together has given me that little online watercooler space to trade bants and ask about everyone's day in our quick little break sessions while also keeping my mind away from all the other little online distractions that normally chip into my workday. A 5 minute TikTok break easily turns into 10, but a little hoops with my colleagues between Pomodoros means we all get back to work (mostly) on time.

On-Together is available as a free demo on Steam right now and its full release will have a bunch of new character customization to unlock and more cute little group areas around the island to work in. The developers GigaPuff have just announced the release date for January 19, which is perfect timing for all my 2026 productivity goals.