Fae Farm

Dammit, I bought another game full price on release day, it is becoming my bad habit of the year. My only excuse is that this time it was another Switch game, and those don’t get much cheaper over time anyway. I got a bit of the blues, and I bought a cozy game to cheer me up: Fae Farm. It’s also available on Steam for PC, and there is a cheaper version without access to the future DLCs there for $40. But I’m on holidays, and Switch and iPad are all I got. Fae Farm is more or less a Stardew Valley clone, with prettier graphics and some quality of life improvement. It isn’t highly original, but it is fun and relaxed. I played through the main story in about 30 hours, but the game doesn’t end there. You could say that the main story is a long tutorial, unlocking most of the content. Afterwards you are free to work on designing the farm of your dreams, or pursuing a large collection of job quests, or trying to befriend or romance one of the villagers.

I find these games have a nice mix of things you “should” do every day, like watering your fields and feeding your animals, with a range of other, optional activities. Well, sooner or later you’ll need to do everything optional, but on a given day it is up to you whether you want to go down a mine for minerals and gems, or whether you would rather spend your day fishing. Fae Farm doesn’t even punish you much if you decide to skip the chores, your fields don’t wither before the end of the season, and your animals never starve. You just don’t get the benefits.

I like the system in Fae Farm where your character stats depend on the furniture in your house. Your life, energy, and mana increase when you put in one of ten per category furniture items. It gives you some more specific goals to decorating that was missing for me in other games, like Animal Crossing. What I didn’t like was that some game systems depend on hard to get ingredients, e.g. Alchemy uses far too many Frog Sweat, and there aren’t enough frogs around when you need them.

Overall I enjoyed Fae Farm, and it did manage to get me out of my blues. It might not be worth $60, but hey, I’m on holiday, I’m currently overpaying for everything!