Fae Farm (2023)

Steam Curator

These cozy farm sims are a known quantity by now, but how often do they have an unlockable double jump? Fae Farms farming and relationship-building mechanics pull from the usual suspects in the cozy gaming pantheon, but it’s the emphasis on character-level powerups and progression that give the game its own unique flair. A lifeless cast with repetitive and boring personalities prevents Fae Farm from entering that pantheon itself, but some smart convenience features, a beautiful presentation, and simple unlocks ensure that it’s always a breezy and enjoyable adventure–even if it’s never an essential one.

You know the drill by now: you find yourself in a small, self-sustaining pastoral town with an unkempt plot and dreams of romance in your heart. You introduce yourself to all of the patronizingly welcoming villagers and learn what function they’ll serve in your farming, and then it’s time for some labor.

You’ll notice a few things on your first lap through the routine, most interestingly is a simplification of the farm laboring processes themselves. The starting farm and the trees, stumps, rocks, and weeds choking it of life don’t demand any inventory swapping to remove their presence. Through the magic of context sensitivity, clicking the X button will just auto-swap to whatever the correct tool for the job is, expend a little of your stamina bar, and then the jobs done.

It’s an input-level pleasantness that you’ll quickly notice is a game-wide design mantra: a conscious effort Fae Farm is taking to never fight you. Getting low on stamina won’t require that you open up your inventory and select which food you want to eat, you’ll instead get a pop-up that presents you with whatever relevant meal you’re carrying with you and a single press will do the job. All the crafting tables can source material not just from your inventory but your storage box too, so you can just empty your pockets into the endless bounds of your storage unit and they’ll be accessible to you when you need them.

You can’t even really fail any of your animals: completely ignore your chickens for a week and you’ll just miss out on a week's worth of eggs, you can pick right back up where you left off if you start petting and feeding them again whenever you want.

It’s welcoming and simple, it de-emphasizes some of the actual minutiae of farm maintenance and frees you up for some of Fae Farms other pursuits: exploring, fighting, and fulfilling quests for your fellow villagers.

Fae Farm is a very quest heavy game: its a game of discrete objectives and increased efficiency in completing them. One of the earliest long-term mainline quests is a multi-day plunge into the 25 levels of a nearby mine to discover a secret at the bottom.

A combination of transporters, more powerful pickaxes, and stamina-sustaining food is required to complete this dive in any reasonable amount of time, and the impact of that progression is tangible.

On my third tier of pickaxe, upgraded with materials acquired from prior delves, I got a magic strike that mined a small area at once–a marked improvement from needing to chip away at nodes individually.

Everything feeds into and out of crafting. Even the Tom Nook types in town don’t just sell items for cash: they’re often selling recipes that demand you come with some of the materials yourself.

The good news is that this process is hypnotic. You find yourself rolling into these progression snowballs, where gathering materials lets you upgrade to get better materials to get better upgrades. It even ties the decoration of your home into a systems-level increase in power: upping the ‘coziness’ of your home (that’s literally what the stat is called), gives you more stamina, health, or mana which aids you in your gathering and you can see where this is going. It’s telling that one of my strongest lingering memories coming off of Fae Farm is its quest completion sound: a soft chime that evokes the game's comfy atmosphere and its small tinge of magic.

But maybe it's a little bit concerning that my primary motivations were so… transactional. The town itself and some of the tangential towns that splinter off of it are beautiful, but their inhabitants suffer from a little same-face and a little same-personality. A lot of the secondary NPCs cycle through the same simple dialogues and even the primary NPCs like the romance options and major merchants have the same put-on soft-niceness just sprinkled with whatever their singular personality quirk or interest is.

It makes the progression of the meters that correspond to the relationships far more interesting and fun than engaging with the relationships themselves; it gives added meaning to the inclusion of local and online co-op, involving real friends is a handy way to distract from how boring your digital ones are.

But even with so central a pillar as friendship being kind of a miss, Fae Farm manages to land a lot of the other aspects associated with the best of these experiences. The delicate sprinkling of magic is a nice touch. There’s delightfully springy mushrooms all over the place that let you jump to high places or just generally glide around. Whenever you’re swimming you do this hilarious little dolphin jump when you press A. When your crafting tables are in gear they get this soft bouncy effect, you can imagine Belle walking around the corner any minute. It’s a carefree and lighthearted world, There’s a hilarious line that introduces your bug net that implies that the insects just love being caught by it: it’s like they’re being absorbed by a friendly cloud.

You eventually escalate into more discrete magic with the introduction of some mystical matriachs, and the game grows its wings right around the time you do: giving you a double jump to close long gaps and just kind of floof around town. Magic also lets you be a sprinkler system in and of yourself: the same magic wand you unlock that can aid in combat or progress to new areas can also water your plants, giving you the boon of a farm-sims late-game equipment suite but localized into your character.

This also coincides with the introduction of some additional biomes you can explore, with their own inhabitants and dungeons you can fold into your daily routines. The best moments in your routine are oftimes the quietest though: like when you’re fishing and the piano in the background hits just right. It’s all a bit twee, and your fondness for Fae Farm will likely be owed to how much you can be carried by the pleasantry of that tweeness: or the satisfaction you get from checking off checklists.

Fae Farm is a pleasant game, both at the aesthetic and gameplay level. Its airy mix of simple systems comes together into crafting and progression that’s greater than the sum of its parts, and it always gently pulls you forward to the next upgrade or area. It’s character-centric and consequence-free approach to farming teases out more of a life-sim than a farm-sim, which will be a pro or con depending on what you’re seeking.

But without any memorable characters to ground its world in or any truly new systems to call its own, it ends up being a little forgettable.

Fans of cozy games will find a worthy title with Fae Farm, but compared to its inspirations: it's more of a short-term fling than a long-term relationship.