Neptune’s Got Talent, Stardew Valley, HoA 3, and Fae Farm. These are the four main things that I’ve been jamming to this past week. For Stardew Valley fans, this begins to reveal why. The cutesy life game we all keep coming back to again and again, purists’ game of choice, and the farming game that dare not speak its name, is finally getting a real contender in Fae Farm. A true maximalist farm life sim, Fae Farm is all full hands-on deck with a range of features, activities, and quality of life touches all which together help make a typical farm life game like Stardew Valley significantly more interesting.
Ostensibly, the magic that comes from Fae Farm’s title is how this RPG game takes the typical Stardew Valley mechanics and injects them with some efficiency benefits. For example, if you want to water your crops in Stardew Valley, you stand next to them and crank the analogue stick until your watering can is empty. In Fae Farm, you can use mana waves to water a patch of land in a square, doing the whole thing in a few seconds. It’s a small but supremely satisfying thing to advance a farming game like this.
Of course, this is also Fae Farm, so it also very much wants to be a magical fantasy game, too. So while at first glance this looks absolutely nothing like Final Fantasy XV: Royal Edition, upon further inspection I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find the precise rotoscoped art style that just rolls off this cart until a perfect pixel like the kind of thing I’ve seen in the cover art of Yashamaru volumes 3 and 4 over the years. This, combined with a 3D perspective and pace that is similar to the one Rune Factory game that I’m so sad I never got to play before it shut down, makes for a unique one-of-a-kind experience that’s exactly what I want from this genre.
Fae Farm has yet to be tweaked for Valve’s handheld Steam Deck, and while the game is playable with default Steam Controller settings in the Steam demo, I did find it more comfortable and effective to use my DS4 as a controller by mapping the left control stick to movement and aiming. The aim reticle even takes into account the 3D perspective and will shift as your character is positioned differently, which gives me confidence that this will be the most optimal way to play when it comes to it.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot packed into this farming game, and a bit like the monsters in Dauntless 2, everything is out to kill you. As a crop farmer, trying to manage your budget and cashflow, it’s entirely possible that your friends invite you to dinner intending to serve you up as dinner. In this case, you’ll want to send them to a unique location to party with them and do a little farming at the same time, since, unlike in Stardew Valley, you can invite up to four friends to join your game. Your friends can invite additional friends too, but each game session won’t expand beyond a set number of players. It’s a nice approach that benefits players who want to play together but may not want to commit to a scheduled gaming session.
As a farming game, there’s, of course, a lot to delve into in Fae Farm. As a full-time, lifelong traveler of the farming game genre out there myself, I saw that the sheer quantity of features and activities in Fae Farm left me out of my depth immediately. The ability to level up 20 different skills 20 times each will guarantee such a colossal diversity to Fae Farm, that it’ll be some time before anyone can see all that this unique game has to offer.
On top of outdoors farming, you can mine for resources in dungeons and manage a mana bar that will be depleted if you use stronger magic attacks and spells. There are fishing and foraging; a co-op multiplayer mode where you and your friend can place down a hot spring together and encourage travelers to stop by to relax; and a campaign with over 40 boss battles. Again, this will be a while before we can experienced it all, but the thing that excites me most is making a typical farming game far more interesting by infusing it with the most obnoxious thing in all of anime – magic.
Fae Farm Fae Farm Valve $TBA Pre-order PC