Southfield Preview

Southfield is a very bizarre title, but one that shows immense promise. At its core, it’s a farming simulator; you’ll farm crops, gather materials to grow the size of your farm and build structures to make your farm your own. Its biggest innovations come in its depth of customisation, automation, and physics systems.

In Southfield, you take the reins of a wobbly little plant guy named Bud, and upon emerging from the dirt, you’re instantly thrust into your main role: farming. After a simple but mostly comprehensive tutorial, you’re given free rein to farm, build, and explore however you’d like. Across the world, you'll collect trees and stones, using them to craft tools to gather crops and materials better, which can become even more efficient after you upgrade them using pebbles, the game's currency. These can be eaten to increase your energy, turned into seeds at a seed maker or sold for pebbles, and some even have unique effects once picked and eaten, such as confusing you and altering your controls.

Making sure you have crops to eat is important, as gathering materials is incredibly energy intensive, overly so to some extent. I do believe this will be offset during co-op, but for solo play, it can get quite tedious. As you begin growing your farm and gathering pebbles, you’ll be able to spend them on upgrading your tools or even using them for certain other quests you’ll find around the area. In regards to exploration, there’s not a whole lot going on in the world outside of some wildlife, some small points of interest you can’t seem to interact with (I might just be missing something), and a few NPCs giving quests or trading. This isn’t a bad thing, and some seeds are being planted for later content, but in its current iteration, it’s not as content-rich as it could be.

Automation is a big part of Southfield, allowing you to build contraptions, such as conveyor belts, to create resource pipelines. It’s a fun iteration of the farming simulator experience with an interesting level of depth for those looking for a change in pace from others in the genre, but, as of now, it’s no Factorio. The building mechanics also carry over this impressive level of depth, allowing individual facets of walls, floors, and roofs to be changed in various ways, to allow for some unique builds visually. In its current state, it’s a highly interesting system, but functionally, it’s a little tedious and awkward, especially when aiming for precision. This carries over to planting and growing plants, as highlighting smaller objects is incredibly awkward due to the physics and movement. Its wildly over-the-top physics systems work perfectly with the game’s silly and quite pleasant atmosphere. Rolling around is a very satisfying way to move around larger distances, and it’s nice to be able to pick up a lot of speed. All this charm comes to a head with the music and art style, being pleasant to look at, and the sound design is utterly fantastic. I could quite happily put the game on, let Bud fall asleep, and just listen to the soundscape; it’s relaxing, and the low stakes of the overall gameplay loop adds to this. It’s perfect to cool down after a stressful day.

In the current beta build provided for this preview, there are some noticeable issues. The biggest thing I've noticed is the generally poor performance; switching between inventory slots, moving items from my hands into my inventory, and generally using any of my tools lead to some pretty drastic frame rate drops, no matter the settings I choose. Outside of this, I also find that physics can often cause a lot of frustration, undermining a lot of the silly charm it does add. Pulling crops out of the ground sometimes teleports me around a little, and at random Bud will drop items within his hands, which can cause a lot of unnecessary fumbling. For clarification, though, it’s not awful, and most of the issues I had were incredibly minor frustrations, many of which I had anticipated going into the beta anyway. Since playing, there has also already been a patch with some minor changes, which is a good sign for further development.

All things considered, Southfield has some utterly fantastic foundations laid. It has a lot of potential to stand out and make some important strides in the genre. Once fleshed out, and generally polished, Southfield is one you should keep your eyes on if you’re a fan of cosy farming simulators.