Verdant Skies (2018)

Verdant Skies is a Harvest Moon-inspired farming/dating sim set on another planet. Instead of a town you have a small space colony, and your efforts help build the colony as you study the new world.

The graphics are terrible. Just putting it out there upfront. The landscape is drawn in 2D but you navigate it in 3D. You can actually see reloading lines on the buildings as you get near them. When you mouse over things, they have an ugly glow around them. One of the worst is when you turn in collections, and they blow up a small object into a pixellated monstrosity before your eyes.

But this game has a ton of content! There were way more character events than I was expecting, as well as events for reaching certain milestones, or encouraging you to explore another part of the world. I got really invested in a few of the characters' storylines, and really it was just a lot of fun.

There was also a fantastic effort to include a diverse cast of characters. Two of them are from Japan, another two speak Spanish. One is a military veteran who was wounded and now has prosthetic limbs. The mechanic is blind. Some of the characters are non-monogamous and only want to date in an open relationship, while others will only be monogamous. There is even an asexual character (!!) which surprised me - I don't think I've ever played a game with an asexual character. That character also uses the they/them pronoun, which is another rarity (although I have seen that one before, haha).

There is no overarching plotline, though, no end goal. You basically play until you get bored of it. I dated the whole town and had a baby and was kind of done. It would have been nice to reach a milestone like after being on the planet for a year, you get to celebrate how far the colony's progress has come or something like that, instead of just drifting away from the game out of boredom.

Overall, if you like Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley games like this and don't mind ugly graphics, this could be a ton of fun for you.

On the one hand, SPACE HARVEST MOON. And the character portraits are lovely

But on the other hand... wow the landscape is hideous. It's a bizarre mishmash of 3D movement and 2D art, some of which kind of reminds me of Neopets art circa 1998, lol. Movement controls are really clunky... your char doesn't intuitively move around obstacles, so you can get stuck on a rock or a wall if you don't click in the exact spot.

Also I keep clicking on the mirror and don't seem to be able to change my char's appearance from the default space suit you arrive in... I can see the options, but can't change to them? I've clicked everything on that screen and I'm not sure what I'm missing.