It’s banjo-filled bumpkin fare – easily the best thing about the game – although it soon palls through repetition. We could go on about the tiny text or the frozen screens or the awkward UI or how it’s easy to get lost or how the day/night cycle feels too fast, but on a positive note, the music is pleasant. The framerate chugs from the very start and our Switch’s fan was going gangbusters. Poor signalling isn’t the worst of it performance is patchy. Only the third time did we realise we’d pressed ‘A’ next to an innocuous tile (looking much like the surrounding tiles of recently-felled trees) and stumbled into a spooky woodland area. Catching us off-guard, we thought we’d entered some sort of Lynchian dreamscape brought on by ignoring our sleep gauge weird, but our interest was piqued. Confusion reigns in other areas, too – twice our screen froze and cut to an eerie area with marauding wolves. Items can be upgraded in town and you’ll find a few different shops and amenities, although working out which houses you can enter involves trial-and-error. Fortunately, NPCs don’t have collision and you simply jog right through them. Your knock-off Animal Crossing avatar’s movement animation is smooth-ish, so long as you don’t snag on the superglue-coated scenery. Menus include touchscreen support and function adequately provided you’ve got exceptionally small hands. Yes, we know games are all just numbers but developer bumblebee does a poor job obscuring that fact and you feel like an accountant managing bars and stats, flushing away any pastoral charm.īut positives – positives! Well, there’s a host of language options. It’s all so nakedly mechanical – make the electricity meter go up, pump vegetable units into the system, transform those values into food units which top up your fodder meter. A minigame-operated generator powers the ‘Fodder-Production-Machine’ which churns out vegetable chum for your livestock (which they promptly turn into ‘turds’, as gramps calls them), but a lack of animation or satisfying feedback seriously hampers your motivation to toil in the fields. The mismatching textures of the town, woodland and river tiles are home to animals waiting to be mischievously renamed. It’s better than it sounds, but not much. The latter is a Fruit Ninja-style minigame where you slice logs, while fishing involves keeping a green bar under a fish that moves along a larger blue bar until another green bar fills. As the clock ticks, a checklist of tasks introduces various mechanics, including feeding your livestock, fishing and chopping wood. Holding ‘R’ activates a slightly faster run – you may as well tape it down. Hunger is another meter to monitor, unless you want to be warped home and informed you splurged on a takeaway.Ĭontrols are simple: ‘A’ and ‘B’ are used for context-sensitive actions with your limited inventory items assigned to the D-buttons. A progress report flashes up at the start of every new day and working your ugly square plots will result in a large stock of veg to be sold or eaten. Later, you’ll be able to customise the landscape, add buildings and employ helpers from the desks in your farmhouse, but that requires coin – for now, it’s off to work with you. Waking up with ‘Y’ immediately ‘teleports’ you to the centre of the cabin, showcasing the game’s rudimentary animation.
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