Farm, Fight, and, er, Fish: The Life Sims Megathread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Farm, Fight, and, er, Fish: The Life Sims Megathread

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

i don't have enough experience in the genre though I have played: Stardew Valley, Graveyard Keeper, My Time at Portia, some of Rune Factory 4, some of Little Dragon's Cafe, Powerwash Simulator, Train Station Renovation, DQ Builders 1 & 2, Staxel, Gas Station Simulator, some of Verdant Skies, and House Flipper. Actually does Fantasy Life count? I guess that's more ARPG than life sim.

I have Gleaner Heights, Epic Chef, and Village Monsters in my current unfinished queue.

Gleaner Heights is basically farming + twin peaks, where there's small-town mysteries and conspiracies happening, but unfortunately I haven't gotten to that part yet as I'm still just starting out on the farm and it's pretty dang slow getting it off the ground compared to Stardew.

Epic Chef is a cooking heavy life sim where you engage in iron chefy battles to make story progress. Your farm is magic and has crops that grow extremely rapidly, there are some contraptions to build, but ultimately the cooking is the primary thing. You toss three ingredients in the pan, and stir to draw the point values out of them. there are synergies where you get bonuses for ingredients depending on what's already in the pan (or if nothing is) and you learn new ones as you level up, which you do by getting vigor, spirit or sophistication points from general activities and then eating one of your own dishes. the battles are basically outscoring your opponent, and for the story ones, catering to the judge's specific interests or avoiding their disinterests while using a sauce that'll affect their taste buds and sabotage their tasting of the opponent's meal. It's.. an alright game, although I think it's pretty unpolished, runs not very well no matter what system it's on, and, I dunno, I just can't quite get into 'the zone' playing this game like I can other life sims.

Village Monsters I have not started yet, but I did briefly play it when it was in early access. this one was in an itch.io bundle, I think maybe the BLM one? it's now hit 1.0 and has a proper story campaign so I am probably going to dig into it in the fall. The art style is a little simple but it seems like it wants to sit between Stardew and Animal Crossing and I could definitely vibe w/ that.

Ones I'm looking forward to/keeping an eye on: Potion Permit, seeing how Dinkum pans out, Ikonei Island, Love Ghostie, I Am Future, Moonshell Island, Lost Nova, Nivalis, Mineko's Night Market

I've not been too much into the pure farm stuff like say Story of Seasons, I think having that extra bit of something like Stardew having the dungeon & community center, Graveyard having the automation, Portia having dungeons and the blueprints, etc. is what really keeps me into the loop. Purely farming/fishing and selling crops/fish isn't enough for me. I might at some point try the Doraemon SoS games but I'm not going out of my way for it.

The 7th Guest fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Aug 30, 2022

# ¿ Aug 30, 2022 05:02

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 15:01

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

Arsenic Lupin posted:

That looks like a lot of experience in the genre to me.

compared to other genres where i've played hundreds of games, it's a much smaller list. and I'm very short on the "(X) Simulator" games.. it's just House Flipper, GSS and Train Station Renovation. I'm sure there's others of those ilk I'd be into but there are so many of them that like. It's tough to know which of them are actually decent.

One other one I forgot was Kitaria Fables but I'd honestly say to avoid it, it's not very good on either the ARPG side or the farming side, and the grind/drop-farming is loving insane in that game.

Graveyard Keeper I liked a lot because of how much you could set up automation, which doesn't necessarily mean I'll suddenly slide into the Factorio/Satisfactory world, but it does mean that eventually I get tired of farming loops v fast and like to make other people do it, lol. Still, the progression of that game was very satisfying in how things kept opening up/unlocking, having a story progression, etc. Except for the last few hours ugh.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2022 05:39

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

LLSix posted:

How are the controls for Gleaner Heights? I've always wanted to play it, for historical reasons if nothing else, but the controls looked and sounded rough in all the videos I've seen.

Yeah, they're definitely odd, I feel like that's the thing that needs the most improvement.. I know the dev is working on 'season two' dlc for the game so maybe they can address it. Playing on the Steam Deck (bear in mind this was over a month ago so I'm going off memory), buttons aren't mapped the way you would necessarily expect, and putting stuff in the sellers box took me a while to figure out. Some of it is button mapping but also some of it is UI as well. Also you run out of stamina REALLY quickly in the early going. Some lunchtime siestas in my v early playthrough!

# ¿ Aug 30, 2022 16:26

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

Propaganda Hour posted:

Did Sandrock get better after launch? I heard it launched into EA in rough shape.

That was the case with Portia as well in its EA period, but for what it's worth, I had played the demo of it a year PRIOR to the EA launch and it already felt more polished than Portia was. so maybe it's just rough in comparison to other finished life sims? the combat is much less horrible (it's not amazing, but it's not ".hack//infection combat" terrible like Portia's). i don't know if the vertical slice of the demo just happened to be more polished than the EA version

i want to support them just because everything's been against them, they had to delay the EA launch for a year and a half because of China's ongoing certification issues with games, and now they had to delay their newest content update because of covid lockdowns affecting their cities. -_-

but at the same time I try to avoid buying early access games just in case the worst happens and the game never gets finished. which happens less and less these days but... it still happens

# ¿ Aug 31, 2022 05:09

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

Metis of the Hallway posted:

My Time at Portia is addicting even though I think it is a fairly terrible game. The mechanics are mostly annoying, none of the writing is very good, it's quite ugly, and YET. I have hours and hours of playtime.

It's crazy addicting. If they actually improve the gameplay systems with Sandrock I'd absolutely be in for it.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2022 06:07

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

alright, so here's my first impressions of Dreamlight Valley after playing it for an hour:

the premise of the game, that people have somehow forgotten Disney characters, would be loving hilarious from a megacorporation, if it didn't feel like a propaganda prelude to a future attempt at extending copyright protections to an even more insane length than already is on the books. Steamboat Willie enters the public domain on Jan 1st 2024, this game will hit 1.0 in 2023, it's hard not to cynically view the timing as more than just convenient. i already despise how long copyright terms are, the thought of Disney possibly getting away with extending them further is nauseating to me

okay but now on to the actual game

gameplay is similar to animal crossing new horizons and they want you to get into the loop as quickly as possible. you find the pickaxe, shovel, fishing rod, and watering can all within one quest. the one thing separating the two is the lack of a bug catching net, but maybe they'll add that in the future. the game has a real-time clock, and i'm not sure how that will impact someone like me who typically plays games at night. will the stores be closed every time i want to play? I'll find out tonight i guess. like animal crossing, stores will change merch daily.

when you start out, the opening area is flooded with purple thorns, which is sort of the magical version of "your new farm is all junked up!" that kicks off most games like stardew/harvest moon. removing them is as simple as hitting a button to pull 'em out, and often times the thorns will be covering up a resource, sometimes seeds, sometimes money, sometimes a chest, sometimes a recipe or a memory (more on this later). it's hard for me to tell if this level of generosity is simply because of the early access period while people have to buy in (outside of gamepass) to play, or if there's a level of insidiousness gameloft is hiding and waiting to spring on me by the time i'm deep into the game

there are story quests, friendship quests and realm quests. story quests of course introduce new gameplay elements or involve expanding the game area, so the first big one was to unlock the Dream Castle, which requires 2000 Dreamlight. don't worry, we're not in IAP Town yet. Dreamlight is basically the game's equivalent of Nook Miles from New Horizons, where doing tasks and getting achievements will give you dreamlight, like removing thorns, mining materials, selling things, catching fish, etc. It didn't take long to get enough to unlock the Dream Castle, which is revealed to be a hub connecting you to other Disney realms that you will go to, to recruit famous Disney characters to come back to the village to live. at launch, given that it's Early Access, there appear to be 4 realms available, with an additional 24 blank doors that presumably will become not blank over the next 6-12 months. You get to choose one of 3 realms to enter first (and will probably have to unlock the other realms with more dreamlight), I chose Ratatouille, but Wall-E and Little Mermaid are also available. From there you do some movie-related tasks to help the character out with their dilemma and then they'll join you I assume (I stopped my session in the middle of the Ratatouille quest).

you can gift things to characters and they'll have friendship quests that seem relatively basic like "hey i think it'd be neat if you cooked this!" and you do that and then your friendship with that character grows. apparently as characters level up, they confer perks to you in terms of additional resources gathered (they pitch it like it's automation but I don't think that's what it actually is)

there are projects to build buildings and improve them by scrooge mcduck which, again, is not IAP territory, it's the regular currency. at least the first two times I did this, the building was instantaneous, so IDK if at some point they will take the tutorial training wheels off and say "okay, from now on, building will take a couple of days like in animal crossing" or if it will always be instantaneous. scrooge's place is a furniture shop, and had a decent amount of stock for the first version of it (4 full-body clothing, 4 partial clothing/accessories/hairstyles, 4 large furniture, 4 small furniture). the other thing that i built was goofy's stall where you can buy seeds and sell your stuff, and it's important to note that it's outside, so hopefully that means if stores DO close at night, that you'll still be able to buy and sell stuff. upgrading it looked pretty cheap at least the first time but i haven't done that yet.

something i should mention that is a little unusual is that your character talks? they have dialog like any other character, even if it's relatively basic. just something i thought was a bit strange compared to other life sims. it's still create-a-character, and it's relatively OK as far as those go. you can be at least a little fat, although no matter what you do with the eyes, nose, mouth, chin, etc, you're gonna have a kind of generic pretty face. there's an OK amount of black hairstyles for people wondering about that although there could be more natural hair styles imo

so where does the Gamelofting come into play? best as I can tell, it's via "events" which is the sort of battle 'pass' of the game. much like dreamlight you can get tokens just by doing basic tasks, and then you can unlock event items with the tokens, and advance from page to page by unlocking a number of items on each page. the launch event is a Pixar Fest event, so you can get things like an Incredibles uniform. but some items are Premium only, and so I guess that's where Premium currency finally rears its head? basically for special event cosmetic unlocks. if that's as bad as it gets, that's honestly pretty banal and not that big a deal.

if you're wondering, yes there's stamina, but no, it's not mobile game energy that you have to pay to refill. you can just restore stamina by going back to your house or by eating food, same as Stardew. the game has cooking and crafting and there's a lot of recipes to find for both. I've already found a number of crafting recipes just from removing thorns and digging things up. the crafting station, at least for now, is in Scrooge's furniture shop, but I have to assume that you'll be able to build your own craft station eventually. also important to note you can place furniture both inside your house and anywhere outside, like New Horizons. this actually is a part of a Scrooge quest of advertising his shop as you craft signs and place them around the village.

i haven't played dreamlight valley enough to give it a proper review, but at least as far as opening impressions go, it hasn't turned me off yet, it's pleasantly decent, it runs ok on the Xbox One X (solid 30fps). as I mentioned before, the EA launch seems to have 4 Disney realms to go to, and it looks like there are sort of 4 'areas' of the main village and then 4 villages to go to, or something like that? you'll be using dreamlight to open areas up, one area required 5,000 (the Dream Castle required 2,000). the dreamlight concept being similar to nook miles is a good way to incentivize longer play sessions, as well as all the recipes to find and craft. the thing that animal crossing will have over dreamlight valley is personality, because nintendo's characterization in animal crossing is allowed to be sillier and unusual than disney would ever allow for their on-brand on-model characters. but at least in terms of gameplay, it's similar enough that it might scratch that itch

e: oh yeah, one thing i can appreciate is despite the store page's indication, there ARE plenty of generic clothing and furniture options and it's not just a 100% nonstop unrelenting Brand explosion. i got some simple red jeans and a couple pairs of ordinary glasses/sunglasses, and there's plenty of non Disney themed furniture to buy from the shop in addition to the "look, it's the dress from that movie!" or "here's a BnL hat from Wall-E"

The 7th Guest fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Sep 6, 2022

# ¿ Sep 6, 2022 16:22

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

Megazver posted:

https://twitter.com/caylenb/status/1569713936328716288

they forgot story of seasons doraemon 2, and dinkum 1.0, and dreamlight valley 1.0, and roots of pacha 1.0, and

# ¿ Sep 13, 2022 19:37

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

potion permit is in two weeks actually!

# ¿ Sep 14, 2022 06:28

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

Jack B Nimble posted:

So, which Life Sim games have the most combat and adversity? These games are definitely overlapping with a lot of things I like but I'm looking for something with a hostile environment.

Rune Factory games have a lot of action. If you want something slightly less life-sim, there's Dysmantle maybe? (by the dev of Jydge and Crimsonland), which is more action & crafting, and only a very very tiny bit of farming, cooking and fishing as optional activities.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2022 20:05

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

if you like identifying mysterious things and also solving weird problems, try Strange Horticulture

# ¿ Sep 29, 2022 03:23

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

Snooze Cruise posted:

also mint is cute

the character animation is so good

# ¿ Oct 8, 2022 03:09

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

the dripfeed and resource walls have been pretty decent in Potion Permit so far, but i've hit the first large one with the cable car. 500-600 wood & stone, and 3000 gold (i imagine the desert barrier will be even larger). it'll probably take a couple of in-game days to get the wood and stone, that's not too big a deal. the gold'll take a little longer unless i use up all my materials to craft a ton of potions to sell in the drop box. at least there are friendship quests to do in the meantime? i've otherwise added the kitchen, upgraded all my tools, upgraded the clinic, cleared the rockslide, fixed the accident site, and saved plants from bugs, without much fuss. it helps that the trees in the deeper forest have 10 wood & 25 wood respectively, and the two types of rocks there add up to 30 for a pair. so it's pretty simple to do a 'resource' day and get a couple hundred of each, and the bathhouse completely refills energy so there's that too.

the weird thing about the game, and idk if it's a post-patch thing, is just how little use the clinic actually gets. i get a patient once every couple of days at most, and i can heal them within the hour. it feels like the apothecary stuff is what you spend the least amount of time on in the game. it's obviously what drives the story and main quests, but most of the game is just helping out around town, doing part time jobs, harvesting outside the town, talking to everyone to increase their friendship levels. and then one hour of the day you do some potioning.

it's not a bad game at all, i think it's pretty decent, it's just odd how it's balanced. if they do another one they may want to learn more from atelier games and how they funnel everything through the alchemy systems & setting, not just the story progression but basically everything.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2022 06:24

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

it's creepy and hosed up that Rue is a romanceable character in potion permit

# ¿ Oct 23, 2022 02:59

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

It's a very story/ARPG oriented game so that doesn't surprise me. Like moreso than Rune Factory.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2022 17:46

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

Jack Trades posted:

I'm enjoying My Time An Portia right now.

I avoided it for the longest time because it looked like a farm sim and I played enough of Stardew Valley already, but no, turns out it is actually a "handyman sim" or whatever you want to call it.

yeah the handyman aspect is the best part. being able to see what you're building is neat too. it's not a great game but it is very addictive. my time at sandrock at the very least addressed the one thing i hated most which was the combat, by upgrading it from "wretched" to "mediocre"

# ¿ Jan 11, 2023 10:05

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

Grow: Song of the Evertree is really hard to define. i almost don't know if it even qualifies as a life sim because it feels like it uses life sim mechanics like fishing and bug catching purely as a means to an end. it's all about creating 'world seeds' that allow you to grow a new area on this giant tree, of harvestable/growable spots, and then doing just that until the area flourishes.. and then meanwhile you also do town building to build up a community.

but like, most of the villagers are randomized creations and so talking to them is kind of pointless because they have no real personality. at least to this point there's been no museum... there are facilities to place like a bakery, a diner, etc, but that just seems like window dressing.

i mean the game's fine, it's just, i think if someone was asking for a life sim specifically i'd have a hard time recommending it. but IDK what genre it fits under otherwise.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2023 18:18

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

Prideful Sloth's (Grow: Song of the Evertree) next game is called Go-Go Town and looks to be Animal Crossing but with more city planning/growing elements

https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/256935954/movie480_vp9.webm?t=1679569544

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2195120/GoGo_Town/

# ¿ Apr 17, 2023 02:08

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

RoboCicero posted:

If their website is to be believed -- Serenity Forge is listed as the developers.

I think Serenity Forge just published DDLC+ on Steam/consoles, Team Salvato is the actual DDLC developer. as far as developing games goes, SF made The King's Bird, Half Past Fate, and Land of Screens. and they assisted on Neversong and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2023 16:03

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

If you're concerned about games for children being full of microtransactions you're about 5-7 years too late to the party.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2023 05:20

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

DQB2 is like, it's something inbetween? Because you go to areas like in DQB1, but you also always return to a hub world where you can build as well, and that is kept and maintained. compared to DQB1 where you were just whisked away to a new place and could never go back, like the anime Unico

there should still be a demo of builders 2 available unless they took it down

# ¿ Jun 23, 2023 17:30

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

i played the demo and it seemed chill but it also had a sterility to it that is hard to explain, i also feel like it could've used a little more to the loop, like if it could've been more like Dysmantle without combat, or something

# ¿ Aug 8, 2023 17:49

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

FWIW, there's a shitton of content in the game already, all that's left is adding multiplayer (which is an entirely separate sort of non-campaign mode) and the epilogue which they say will be another 20 hours of content. but it took me 70 hours to reach the cutoff point where the epilogue would start, and i am the type to not 100% games and mostly beeline main story content. so for some people what's there might run you all the way to november anyway.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2023 18:20

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

1.0 was delayed to november so they could continue to optimize the game (especially those load times...)

# ¿ Sep 14, 2023 18:14

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

StarkRavingMad posted:

I see My Time at Sandrock is exiting Early Access today. Anyone have experience through the EA on how it is?

it's definitely better than Portia. characters have more effort put into their story arcs/quests, and there's a lot more to build in general, including stuff for character quests. as always you get to see your stuff in action after you build and place it, and there are some big time projects like building a huge bridge to repair the one that got destroyed. the main town is deceptively small but it's vertically(sloping..ly?) stacked in a way that it still feels kinda big

the art style is still not going to win anyone over but it's not ugly

the biggest changes are... mining is not random confusing caverns anymore but techy ruins, so it's easier to find your way from floor to floor. combat is now serviceable rather than absolutely dogshit awful. loading times aren't as horrendous (though they're still pretty long, especially the first load after boot getting into your game).

there's a lot more cutscene events and an overall story about the town being at threat of extinction, a rogue outlaw causing trouble, and possible war on the horizon, which ekes out as you fulfill the various main mission requests

i played for around 75 hours and that was to the end point of the EA content, prior to the epilogue act that they released a couple of weeks ago. so it's got a lot of content

the minigames/holidays are still nothing particularly special and honestly i think that life sim developers should consider whether it's worth having these holiday/minigames break up the usual gameplay if the events aren't that memorable. i've played a fair number of life sims and i've never particularly cared for the special holiday/minigame days in any of them because it's just never the developer's best suit. but a couple do have unique building projects to do at least.

if the building and installing of things from blueprints was what you liked about Portia, then you'll like Sandrock because it is a lot of that. and a lot of workshop machines toiling away processing all the materials. the game adds a water mechanic where you need to keep your plot hydrated to keep the machines going in addition to fuel. it's only sparse in the early game but by the end it's very easy to fill up the water tank and be fine for a while. but basically the town is a desert environment with sandstorms so there are some unique mechanics that go along with it. you can't cut down any trees for example, but there are other things you can get dew from and plenty of scrap types to swing a pickaxe at in the world

the commissions and builder guild stuff is similar to the last game, easy way to make money, and on weekends you can inspect items like in portia. the museum returns as well. and the research lab where CDs are used to develop new machine types. so they didn't fix what wasn't broken

The 7th Guest fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Nov 2, 2023

# ¿ Nov 2, 2023 18:16

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 15:01

The 7th Guest: Dec 17, 2003

it looked neat, but i'll have to see what the mix of detective and lifesim stuff is. i'd be fine with it being more mystery than lifesim personally, but achieving the right balance was a difficulty for swery's The Good Life (which fell off the map so completely and thoroughly that I think me mentioning it will cause people to remember that it exists)

# ¿ Nov 15, 2023 02:24

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Farm, Fight, and, er, Fish: The Life Sims Megathread