You’re a convict. Not the grandkid of some beloved local who left you a deed, a shed of rusty tools and a town full of people waiting to like you.
That’s the setup for Grave Seasons, and it tells you most of what you need to know about where farm games are headed. Everyone in town has reason to fear you. Then folks start dropping dead, and you’ve got a good reason to fear them right back.
Farm-sims have looked and played pretty much the same for the last 10 years. That’s not surprising. When you find a winning formula that keeps your studio’s lights on, you follow that formula. But a fresh crop of farm games is pushing the boundaries now, and what’s coming looks more varied than anything the genre has offered since 2016.
How the genre got so comfortable
Stardew Valley reignited interest in farming games in 2016, back when Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons had faded into distant memories and the whole genre had lost its mainstream pull. A trickle of new farm games followed. Marvelous, the Story of Seasons studio, revived its biggest hit with Friends of Mineral Town, a remake of the GBA game that was itself a remake of Harvest Moon 64, which is the game that inspired Stardew Valley in the first place.
Then the pandemic hit, cozy games went vertical, and the trickle became a flood. The substance varied. The form barely did.
Here’s the shape of it. You take ownership of a run-down farm and plant new life in it. A village sits nearby with a dozen or so potential friends and romance partners plus a handful of other personalities to befriend. You craft, decorate, mine and fish, all of it feeding into expanding your farm or making the town better again. Relationships unfold on rails, with a new scrap of someone’s life handed to you at every friendship rank. Some backstories are tragic, some touching, but they sit in separate boxes and none of them change what you do. Give people gifts, and they will love you.
Same game, different hat
Dinkum is Stardew but Australian. Coral Island is tropical Stardew with mermaids and a little fantasy trim. Disney Dreamlight Valley leans closer to Animal Crossing, though its farming and village life come straight out of Stardew. Fae Farm has fairies. Roots of Pacha has dinosaurs and irrigation. Sun Haven has the sun. Wylde Flowers adds witches, Graveyard Keeper goes morbid, Tales of the Shire puts hobbits to work, Littlewood goes retro.
For all those tweaks, each one unfolds the same way. It’s become the cozy version of the AAA open-world: everything recognizable, everything sanded down to be as frictionless as possible. Strip the surface differences and you’re playing the same game.
None of which is a dismissal. Those are good farm games, Tales of the Shire excepted, which is pretty rough. They’re just the same kind of farm game.
The oddballs of the last decade fit on one hand. Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin farms rice and only rice, and asks you to learn the real intricacies of cultivation and harvesting to pull the best possible crop. A handful of Rune Factory re-releases, Marvelous’ Story of Seasons spin-off where you farm and RPG at the same time, found their audience even as Rune Factory 5 struggled. Otherwise, when a new farming game got announced, or a Nintendo Direct came loaded with them, you knew exactly what you were getting.
The pitch is “farming, and” now
When a studio announces a farm game these days, there’s a good chance the hook is “farming, and” rather than “this flavor of farming.” Farming and horror. Farming and supernatural storytelling. Farming and dungeon-crawling town-building.
Son M., a founder of Perfect Garbage, said they believed more developers want to push the boundaries of cozy games, turn the genre upside down and see what they can do with the pieces that fall out.
Grave Seasons slipped from its planned August release, but the boundary-pushing is already visible in what Perfect Garbage has shown. It’s an introspective monster-mash horror story as much as a farm game, and the studio is treating genre staples as storytelling tools instead of checkboxes. Invading your neighbors’ privacy and rifling through their things, for instance, is a thing farm games have always let you do. Here the neighbors won’t appreciate it, and your actions mean something different as a result. Take the horror out and the game stops working.
The witches have their own problems
Marvelous published Moonlight Peaks in July. I assumed vampire-flavored Stardew. Developer Little Chicken had bigger ambitions than that.
Moonlight Peaks throws out Stardew’s fractured storytelling and folds every character’s tale into the town’s wider story. The farming is largely what it’s always been. The characters aren’t. These depressed witches and werewolves don’t exist purely for you to fall in love with. They have needs and hopes of their own, and the result is a community story with an actual message.
Nippon Ichi Software released Village in the Shade in Japan on July 30, with an international launch set for Oct. 27. On the surface it’s classic Harvest Moon: mining, fishing, shipping your most valuable crops, getting closer with the locals of a tiny nearby town. It’s also a horror game. Mythological terrors stalk the streets after dark, and the village is sitting on a darkness nobody is permitted to acknowledge. If you’re a weeb like me, think Yomawari and Boku no Natsuyasumi with farming.
The appetite is measurable. Village in the Shade has already sold more than 200,000 copies in Japan and became one of NIS’ most successful games of the decade on release.
A farm inside a prison
Cygnus Cross puts Emberville into early access on Oct. 27 as well. Skim the trailer and you’d file it as Gothic Stardew with a deep voice cast. Ben Starr, Jennifer English, Amelia Tyler, Matt Mercer, Nick Apostolides, Anjali Bhimani, Doug Cockle and Briana White are just some of the names.
You will tick off the familiar list. Grow crops. Help the neighbors. Rebuild the local community center, design your homestead. But helping in Emberville also means exploring the gigantic dungeon prison your town happens to be sitting inside, and reckoning with generations of strange magic piled up down there. Graveyard Keeper was a macabre, darkly comic spin on Stardew that stayed recognizably Stardew. Emberville is an action-RPG inside a farm-sim inside a decorating game.
Maybe this is coincidence rather than a real shift. Maybe it doesn’t last. But four of these are launching or planning to launch in the same year, and the people making them say the attitude toward cozy games is changing.
Which means that this October, somewhere in a tiny mountain village, you’ll be shipping your best crop before sundown because of what walks the streets after it.
