Harvest Days Preview

Go back to your childhood village, Duda’s Village, where you learned to cook, fish, farm, and take care of animals in order to escape your nine-to-five life. Join me as I experience the pre-alpha 1.07 update.

The first thing the preview shows off is the game's story, following a typical tale of a character moving from the big city life into a rural village. Although this time we won't be inheriting any farms from deceased family members, instead we move to Duda's Village since the town has suffered a 90% population loss and is offering free housing in exchange for work in hopes to bring the resurgence of the village.

First off, I’d like to mention the game’s graphics, as it is one of the most evident aspects of it. Many of the character models feel very copy-pasted, with no offer to customise your character, but instead, you have to play from a preset for the two genders. Although I didn't mind this since the female has a pretty model on her back due to the long ginger hair, though I would have preferred to select my own. The design for the characters is alright; however, I did feel that the face specifically needed some more work. That said, I do believe customisation for your character is implemented somewhere, even if it is just changing the colour of their hair and (maybe) some hairstyles, although the game's lack of tutorials made this difficult to see, as I am unaware of where I could do this.

Aside from the unsightly character faces, the environment uses similar polygonal looks that give the game a decent style, although some places felt as if they stuck out, including the names of the various stores feeling almost hyper-realistic in contrast to the game's graphic style.

Gameplay-wise, an average 24-hour period in Harvest Days lasts 20 hours, from 6–2 am, each hour lasting around one minute. Generally, you'll want to plant, water, or harvest when applicable. One of my quarrels with the game is the mandatory animation that plays every time you interact with the farm, most notably the watering animation; it takes far too long and feels uncomfortable. A minor gripe, however.

Once you have finished with the farming aspects, you'll move on to the quest board where NPCs throughout the game will ask for items; more often than not, the request will be either wood or stone; this was the source of most of the bugs present throughout the game.

Early on, I grabbed a quest that asked me to give Marcus 15 stones; it was a simple quest since I'd farmed some of it with the excess energy left after farming. The problem began when I couldn't find Marcus despite searching for him the entire day... day after day. After three days of non-stop searching, I decided I was going to give up and check the quest board to see if perhaps there was any additional information or a way to abandon the quest, only to see that I could accept a new one to give 15 stones to Amanda. The problem? Amanda didn't want to accept the items, but the game recorded her quest in the journal. I got to accept this quest seven times before I gave up and moved on with my day. The bugs didn't stop there, however, as I then wasn't able to pick up any more quests that worked properly. One of them involved me giving Matthew 15 stones, but he rewarded me 600 coins for it when the usual reward is 40; once I'd turned it in, the exclamation mark above his head wouldn't go away. Suddenly, everyone in Duda's Village wanted 15 stones, and everyone was paying me erratic prices for them. I won't give too much flack to Harvest Days for the bugs, however, this one did manage to end my run.

AMANDA, STOP.

While I'm talking about every character suddenly having an aspiration for owning 15 stones, I would like to mention that they overall feel like the most unpolished aspect of the game. Their dialogue is often one sentence with awkward writing and uncomfortable English; they just sometimes straight-up tell you what their favourite fruit or flower is without prompt, removing the gift-giving exploration present in other games of the genre. The awkward writing and lack of personality from each of the 17 residents present in the game repelled me from actually wanting to interact with them. I sincerely hope this aspect specifically will receive TLC.

One final thing I'd like to talk about is the aforementioned lack of tutorials. Although I know the game is merely in its pre-alpha stage, the lack of tutorials made finding out what to do and how to do it a rather arduous task, as tutorials are instead replaced with a text-box that appears seemingly at random explaining one of the numerous buildings present throughout Duda's Village. This was less than ideal, as I was neither aware where any of these were, nor was the information presented to me when it was relevant but instead replaced with text boxes that appear possibly after a set amount of time had passed since the last one.

Harvest Days has potential, the world is quite large for a game in its pre-alpha stage, with tons of things to do and collect. I look forward to the numerous bugs and fps drops to be fixed, alongside some much-needed polishing for a lot of the content within the game.