Fae-folk, magic, and wondrous creatures offer an enchanting setting for a farming sim, and Fae Farm certainly has a lot of aesthetic charm. The characters are these adorable large-headed people with cute little expressions, and the cutscenes are all beautiful illus♔trations reminiscent of what you’d find in a childr💃en’s book of fairytales. Despite this, it took me a while to feel the magic in Fae Farm.

I had the benefit of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:previewing it a few months back, so I knew it would eventually get good. However, the opening of the game is deceptively simple. You burn through the first two chapters in the bli꧑nk of an eye, with little depth to either the story or the𓃲 mechanics. The lack of a strong narrative didn’t bother me. Most of the time farming sims offer the same ‘Grandpa croaked and left you a farm’, so there’s not exactly a high bar. But the level of mechanical simplicity was off-putting even for a genre like this.

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I get the idea behind it. You don’t want to overload the player, and there’s a lot to get your head around once all the mechanics and features open up that it would be easy to become overwhelmed. Fae Farm overcompensates for this and ends up feeling weaker as a conseque🐓nce. This slow start might be a struggle🍃 for people to overcome, as they’ll largely be unaware of the game’s full promise. This is a shame, since when it gets good, it gets really good.

Onc𓃲e you’ve completed your first dungeon and the requisite quests, things start to get mꩵore interesting. Your basic crafting stations expand in use as you progress, opening up new areas and unearthing new crafting ingredients. You’ll be able to build new and more exciting crafting stations, and it’s here where true farm sim fans will really fall in love.

You can stick to the basics if you want. There’s nothing wrong with cooking food on a Cooking Fire. But♉ for those who want to get more involved in the nitty-gritty of crafting, you can create the Food Prep Table to turn raw ingredients into… well, posher raw ingredients. These can be used in the Cooking ﷽Hearth to make even better dishes with enhanced benefits.

There’s a lot of depth in crafting and weighing up the best results. Do you just sell critters, or do you put them in a Critter Conservatory to get the items they yield? Do you then use those items to craft something to use or sell? It can be as simple or complicated as you want it to be, and there’s no s😼hame in not getting into the fine numbers of profits and loss and just stacking all your critters in your Produce Stand to make as many pennies as possible.

This is indicative of all the gameplay within Fae Farm. You can keep it simple, or you can get st🦋uck in. Yꦫou can plant normal flowers, or you can cross-pollinate to create rarer flowers. You can raise animals for their produce or start breeding them. You can go dungeon diving and kick monster butt, or make invisibility potions and avoid all the drama of battle. The freedom to experiment with your priorities is a big plus.

Even the simple task decorating your home is more complex than it seems, as certain items have a Coziness Rating which give your cha😼racters added benefits, increasing the rate at which your health, energy, and mana replenishes. The level of detail that’s gone into it is pretty impressive.

Fae Farm also goes to great lengths to improve the usual farming sim staples.💫 Rather than always manually switching between tools, you automatically change to whichever tool you nee🍃d when farming and harvesting. There’s also a lot more freedom, even to the point of moving already growing crops wherever you want without consequence.

There’s also multiplayer, which we rarely see in farming sims. I admit, I didn’t try it. 𝄹The parent in me applauds only being able to invite players on your Phoenix Lab friend list, but it meant it wasn’t as easy to check this out, and I’m more of a lone farmer anyway. But if you want friends and family along for the ride, it’s great to see Fae Farm support this feature from launch.

One of the things I loved most was the freedom in traversing the world of Azoria. You’re not forced to follow🧜 set paths. You can just run and jump over the river and roofs to get back into town. It’s all the more enjoyable when you unlock the fairy wings that give you the ability to double jump. There are a few off-limit places you can’t go until you progress the story enough to get the magic or item you need to address whatever is causing you from going further, but whatever area you have access to, you can bound all over the place. Compared to Stardew Valley or Story of Seasons, it feels quite liberating

The completionist in me loved critter catching and fishing, netting and landing all those ༺bugs and fish Animal Crossing-style to tick them off in the Almanac. For everything you do, from mining to foraging to magic, your skill increases. The more you do, the more extra bonuses are𝓀 unlocked. It doesn’t stop there either. You can then take on job quests for specific skills, though you can only have one active at a time across all the different skills, which is a bit restrictive.

Alongside job quests are the main story quests, side quests, friendship quests, romance quests, and shipping contracts. Once again, you’re restricted in that romance and friendship quests reset with each day. There’s so much optional side stuff to do that even though I&rsq🍃uo;ve progressed the storyline, I feel I🍷’ve barely scratched the surface of everything on offer. My house and farm don’t look their best, and I’m still being pretty basic at how best to turn a profit. This rate of progression could be tweaked a bit to provide a more engaging, satisfying gameplay loop.

There were a few bugs to contend with, and I don’t just mean the critters you can catch. Nothing game-breaking, but they showed up quite frequently. The most common one was when I tried to go to my House Storage, the Almanac would open instꦑead. Clicking through a couple of times got me where I needed to be, but it was an odd glitch. A couple of times, when trying to use a station, it would force my cursor over to the results side, and I’d be unable to choose new ingredients. No matter how hard I tried, it would just ping back over.

A couple of things didn’t work as well as intended, either. I prefer to play with a controller, yet when naming anything, there doesn't seem to be a way to select letters with a controller. Ultimately, I had to resort to using my keyboard at times. Maybe this was a glitch, too? By far, the oddest thing that happened was when I bought a Cottontail, it auto-generated the name of ‘Hopscotch’. I was too lazy to change it, but when I tried to proceed, the game told me it was an inappropriate name.

Fae Farm gets off to a slow start, but you’ll see the game’s true value from Chapter Three onwards, when the crafting, romance, questing, and other optional content becomes so vast that you’ll never be able to keep up with it all. For fa🌌ns of farming sims willing to get over the first hurdle, the actual gameplay is highly enjoyable, and the style and setting are utterly adorable. Just don’t expect a standout narrative🌳, but do expect a few minor bugs.

Score 3/5. A PC code was provided by the publisher.

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