A lighthearted and easy farm sim marred by efficiency blemishes.
It’s no secret that the farming sim style has blown out and expanded lately. Following the success of Stardew Valley, Fae Farm is the most recent high-profile launch within the style, boasting a whimsical land, charming characters, and a wealth of issues to do by means of the 4 seasons. My time dwelling on the earth of Astoria was a nice journey, regardless of some cracks within the basis.
Your villager chooses to begin their new life with a plot of land in Astoria, a close-knit island group stuffed with enjoyable characters which might be abundantly pleasant and desperate to information you towards completely different sport options by means of easy aspect quests. Some examples embrace buying and utilizing fertilizer, or buying and registering Chickoo & Cottontail animals (this world’s model of chickens and a bunny/sheep hybrid). The breadcrumbs of instructing the participant in regards to the options of farm life, house constructing & decor, useful resource gathering, and crafting are meted out constantly sufficient to information the participant with out feeling cumbersome or frivolous. Fae Farm needs to show you to fish by means of all its methods relatively than supplying you with one, so to talk.
![](https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/media/61543/1/8.jpg)
Chores will really feel acquainted to these initiated to the style, if not with a number of twists. Completely different soil beds have to be constructed relying on the kind of plant you’re trying to develop, so flowers would want to have a distinct kind of bedding than turnips. Crops develop in several seasons and require numerous days to germinate. Your farm additionally begins suffering from timber, rocks, logs, and brush to clear away, requiring instruments that want upgrading over time to chop by means of extra formidable obstacles. As soon as these instruments are upgraded sufficient, you achieve the power to carry out a magic spell that’ll have an effect on an space of 9 tiles, which is a pleasant contact and shortly equips you with environment friendly instruments that maintain the tempo shifting. Over time you will get a produce stand to promote crops or different supplies on-site, however there are further areas on the town the place your wares can be offered.
The crafting and ornamental options in Fae Farm are large. You begin with a reasonably fundamental listing of things that expands over time as you achieve the power to make specialised crafting tables to cook dinner meals, minimize lumber, and polish stones into jewels, adorning tables to make home windows and different wall mounts, and looms to fabricate your personal clothes. The variety of new gadgets and crafting choices that come about is sort of daunting, with an exhaustive almanac that notifies you of each entry. Typically I respect when the participant is introduced with extra choices, however I would really like an choice to mark all notifications as full within the menu so I don’t have an unread exclamation mark looming over me.
![](https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/media/61543/1/7.jpg)
A really cool wrinkle of house decor and design in what you select has a direct influence over the battle/dungeon crawling facet of the sport. Furnishings and the like have attributes tied to them that have an effect on your fight effectiveness, comparable to including well being, mana, assault, or protection attributes. As somebody who doesn’t dedicate a lot time to house design in sim video games, this can be a actually neat characteristic that incentivized me to dive into constructing and inserting furnishings as a approach to optimize my construct out relatively than fear about getting a excessive rating in cute factors. Dungeon crawling and fight isn’t as sturdy as different actions in Astoria. Your wand has a fundamental swing, and magic skills are gained as you delve deeper into dungeons. Nevertheless it’s methods during which different items of gameplay feed into the fight that maintain it from changing into rote.
Although the map house is considerably restricted, the world of Astoria is supposed to be explored. Guided roads will lead you to completely different factors of curiosity simply sufficient, however you aren’t constrained to them and might even jump over ledges or bounce into the ocean and swim throughout it to completely different shores. In case you do, you’ll be rewarded with scrolls littered in every single place that maintain recipes to make completely different house fixtures. Strolling from finish to finish of the map gained’t take a very long time, however quick journey waypoints could be unlocked to maneuver you instantaneously and make hopping round painless. In case you get misplaced or are searching for a particular townsperson, a marker device will let you choose one and pops open an arrow on display pointing to their route, which is a very welcome characteristic that streamlined my strolling route.
Stylistically, the sport leans all-in on a cute and playful tone. All of the characters are extra on the brief and stubby finish with easy however expressive faces and reactions to conversations. Moreover, your character has a wholesome set of emotes and responses to issues like arid warmth or cool days. The world is colourful and has nice thematic group that has every patch of Astoria feeling tonally constant. The soundtrack is a relaxing combination of wind devices, stringed devices, piano, chimes, and quiet nature sounds, which is nice however doesn’t fairly stand out as extraordinary.
The place Fae Farm struggles is in efficiency. Loading screens are an actual drawback. It takes a full fifty seconds to load from the title display to the sport. As soon as there, the load screens are rare sufficient to principally overlook, however how lengthy it takes to see motion is jarring. Ongoing efficiency stutters and hitches are constant, they usually stretch past the hustle and bustle of extra populated city areas. It’s lucky that the fight isn’t too advanced, as a result of in any other case there’d have been a handful of instances these stutters may have actually broken me.
Fae Farm is a sport the place the builders have efficiently streamlined the extra tedious items of farming, chores, dungeon crawling, quest completion, and exploration so the participant can shortly dive into the options and determine their sim life rhythm. The sheer variety of issues to do retains the expertise recent and for probably the most half limits the tedium that this style could be responsible of. Past the obvious technical points, Fae Farm has rather a lot to supply for each new and skilled gamers of the farm sim if you happen to can forgive it.