Is there anything more fear-inducing in this world than a haircut? Whether it be the need to endure a cacophony of sensory nightmares, or the knowledge that a stylist who doesn’t quite care enough could turn your split ends into the split end of your social life, the whole process is dredged in anxiety. So how about a game where you have to play as a hairstylist that must take all of this into consideration, where all of your customers are beastfolk and you’ve made a deal with a demon? Enter Beastfolk Barber.

The easiest immediate point of comparison for Beastfolk Barber is something like Coffee Talk. You play as Freddie, the manager of a salon that can only open one day a week. She recently came across a strange mirror made by her deceased friend that can magically show your patrons what their haircut could look like, but you can only preview a given haircut three times. So, it’s important that you stay chatty with your clientele to learn about them and the reasons they’re getting a haircut. Oh, and all of your customers are animal people.

Your impetus for bringing in customers, and more importantly regulars, outside of the possibility of being shut down, is that a demon, a mysterious type of beastfolk, who tasks you with bringing in 10 regulars by a certain date so that she feels confident you can cut her hair, subsequently granting Freddie a wish to undo an undisclosed (to you) regret of hers.

Piecing together what haircuts look good is a cute process, and you can mark which combinations you picked on which preview, with little microgames involving cutting, shaving and the like interspersed throughout the chopping. What struck me is the thought that’s been put into this world. Beastfolk weren’t always a common people to come across, but these days most cities are filled with all sorts of species. That doesn’t mean life is perfect.

Your first actual customer is a two-headed dragon, each head his own person. Technically. In actuality, one of the heads isn’t legally recognised as a person, counting as an organ for the other person. The two of them work for a senator, and they’re getting this haircut for a reason unrelated to this personal issue of theirs; they’re trying to get a bill passed that would change the age at which each species legally counts as an adult, as opposed to the default, human-centric 18 that it currently is.

The two also argue the entire time they’re in your care, all in the name of practice for the debate, but the contents takes the world’s politics quite seriously (even if they do make some quips at one another here and there). It is not just some cut game where you cut the hair of furry-adjacent people, and that helps to position it as something worth paying attention beyond having an appealing aesthetic. Which it does, by the way, just some gorgeous pixel art on display here.

I don’t know if the full thing will deliver or not, and whether it’ll fall at the hurdle on the obvious parallels it’s making towards real-world minorities – stories like these that don’t actually feature real-world minority designations often fall a bit flatter – is still yet to be determined. But I’ve been won over by the demo, and I’ll be curious to check out the full thing, whenever it launches. You can wishlist Beastfolk Barber on Steam here.