Sometimes spinning up near-workspaces might not be needed if you're only going to simulate view methods or storage. By mocking the NEAR environment imports you can easily and fast spin up a smart contract runner for such simple use cases.
Given you have a simple contract my-contract.wasm that exports a view function named hello, and you can provide name as an argument, you can test that it returns a given value like shown in the example below.
import { getContractInstanceExports } from "./contract-runner.js";
const { exports, nearenv } = await getContractInstanceExports(await readFile('./my-contract.wasm'));
nearenv.set_args({ name: 'peter' });
exports.hello();
expect(nearenv.latest_return_value).to.equal('hello peter');