Haunted Chocolatier teasers are still rolling even while development is paused for Stardew

We've gotten another bittersweet taste of Haunted Chocolatier. Sweet because, well, it's Haunted Chocolatier, and bitter because I still don't know when this game is coming out. But we do have some new screenshots: in a tweet earlier today, Haunted Chocolatier and Stardew Valley dev Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone shared four tantalising new screenshots of the spooky sweet-making sim. Here they are:

Barone shared the new screens in celebration of hitting a million followers on Twitter, which honestly seems more like a nightmarish burden to me. The shots show off a few new spaces: a cosy house/shop, a woodland inhabited by little slime-looking guys, a fountain at night, and somewhere that looks like a library. It all looks very sumptuous indeed.

You can also see, in that forest screenshot, our hero firing a bow and arrow at a thing that looks a bit like Oddish, which doesn't sound like it's in the remit of a chocolatier.

Although given that we got another new screenshot for the game less than a month ago, we're feasting on Haunted Chocolatier content in a relative sense. But still, Barone hasn't dropped any hints about when we can expect to see the game or anything similarly juicy. We'll have to content ourselves with ginning up more fan theories based on these screens. Maybe that really is Oddish, who's to say? (It's not).

We can probably assume we won't see Barone's new game in the near future, though, given that he's put Haunted Chocolatier's development on pause so that he can focus on Stardew Valley's ever-growing 1.6 update.

Although Barone originally pitched that update as being "for modders," it sure sounds like it's gonna bring a lot of stuff to the 7-year-old farming sim. We're talking support for eight players, three new festivals (one "major"), and new items, recipes, and late-game content. Well, I guess the modders will enjoy all that too, to be fair.