Everdream Valley Review

Everdream Valley is a farming life simulator developed by Mooneaters and published by Varsav Game Studios and Untold Tales. You play as a kid visiting your grandparent's farm over summer vacation. However, it's in a little disarray after they were forced to have an extended stay at the hospital, and some rowdy kids decided it would be a good idea to have a party there while they were away. Your job is to restore the farm back to its former glory and try to enjoy your vacation until your parents come to pick you up, but there seems to be more going on than meets the eye — Talking scarecrows and animals might guide you to something greater.

Straight from the get-go, I have to gush about the graphics. It uses a cartoon art style full of vibrant colours and cute character models. Seriously, I would love to buy plushies of the chickens and cows; they’re really cute. Actually, there is a serious focus on animals which include pigs, cows, chickens, ducks, goats, alpacas, horses, sheep, bees, wild boar, magpies, beavers, bisons, geese, deer, frogs, beetles, butterflies, dragonflies, wolves, mice, snails, slugs, fish and more I haven’t seen yet.

The entire world is pretty large, with plenty of small secrets to discover, but it does feel a little empty as there aren’t many NPCs roaming around other than animals. Even the area you're locked to at the beginning is fairly big, but it was fun exploring the place, finding new crops and items to bring back to improve the farm, and once you start repairing bridges, the game opens up massively. While I don’t often like larger worlds, it is mitigated once you start getting mounts like horses to help get around the place much quicker. I did find it a little weird that you can’t go into shallow water, but it’s a minor nitpick in the grand scheme of things.

Now I used a controller for my playthrough, but I found the control scheme a little unintuitive: the control types were lacking, and there was no way to remap buttons. I got used to it; however, the journey to that point was kinda bothersome, with me opening up menus I didn’t want until I found the one I was looking for. Still, once you do get used to it, it works well though there are definitely better control schemes.

But enough about that, let’s get into the real meat of the game: maintaining and growing the farm.

Farming is fairly standard, and if you’ve played Stardew Valley or My Time At Portia/Sandrock, you’ll find yourself in familiar territory. For crops, you have to till the ground, plant the seeds, and then water them every day until they’re ready to be harvested. As for tending to animals, you need to keep them fed and loved while occasionally play a mini-game every few days to get milk, wool, etc. Now, in games like these, I usually find farming sort of annoying at the start, and it takes up a good chunk of time to maintain, often taking over a majority of my playtime during the early parts of the game. However, Everdream Valley eases the process by doing some really cool things for you, one of which is the basket as once you get it, you automatically harvest anything near you, saving you from needing to spam the confirm button. Also, in the beginning, your grandparents will take care of most of the busy work until the farm grows, allowing you to focus on other activities and goals until you can automate the process. Heck, your grandfather will actually hand you crops at the start of every day, which is very nice. Even better, a single day lasts a fairly long time, allowing a lot of freedom on what to do with your time, which is a good thing as there is a lot to do in and around the farm, but it never feels overwhelming. Just go at it at your own pace, and that’s what I really like about Everdream Valley; you can do anything and everything at your leisure.

Which leads me to talking about how progression is done here. You won’t be able to do a lot without completing some quests. I found the main and side quests a little basic but fun to do; it helps teach you how the game works and slowly unlocks more things you can do and craft. I would’ve liked some tips here or there on how to complete some quests, and a lot of them are just getting certain items or waiting for something to happen, but it does the job. The same goes for the mini-games and little activities such as training your dog or shearing sheep: They aren’t the most complex things in the world, but they kept me engaged, and it never seemed tedious or boring. I also liked how you upgrade your stamina, finding it rather rewarding for just doing something so small. Almost everything you eat refills your stamina meter and increases its maximum. While simple foods like berries and apples will suffice for a while, eventually, you need to eat actual meals to further increase your stamina, which means you need to find recipes or discover new meals by experimenting, which means you need more crops… and well, you get the idea. Everything you do has a purpose, and even if you feel as though you’re goofing off, you’re at least progressing towards something, even if it’s just to make enough money so you can afford the criminally overpriced items the Merchant sells.

Seriously, a black T-shirt is around 500g.

Eventually, though, you will need to head home and go to sleep, and that’s where things start to get weird and wonderful. At various points during the main quest, you’ll be taking control of one of the animals on the farm at night to go on a small adventure that will reward you or affect the farm in the morning. They’re a fun change of pace, but the first one I played, I did have an issue with, and it’s more from a game design perspective. Wolves can attack your farm to go after your sheep, destroying any fences in their way. In these moments, you control your dog to bark them away. While I find these sections good enough, I feel like it contradicts the more cosy and relaxed gameplay and atmosphere, and it is very annoying having to repair and herd any released animals back into their pens. There is an option to turn off these sequences, it costs you a sheep every time it should be played, which is annoying, and you could potentially lose a personal favourite sheep from the flock. I'm not saying these moments are bad, but I wouldn't miss them if they were removed entirely.

Onto technical performance, it ran beautifully. I had no issues, it ran at a consistent framerate, and I found no major glitches that would affect the experience. I, however, do have a slight issue with the UI: the time and day window covers up part of the stamina meter. Couldn’t the minimap be shifted up a little? I also found organising quests a little annoying, there are more tools than you need around the farm, and the camera can be kinda finicky, but that’s just nitpicking. I did see some people losing their save files, so I recommend manually saving often; The autosave isn’t the most reliable.

Overall, Everdream Valley is a very relaxing game where you can take it at your own pace. You won’t find yourself needing to do everything as soon as possible, and I really liked the sense of progression. It could use a little more polishing here or there and a few patches, but I thoroughly recommend getting Everdream Valley.