Fae Farm Review

Fae Farm is a new cosy farming simulator title by Phoenix Labs set in the enchanted lands of Azoria — a world full of magical issues that begs for your help!

The game starts off by letting you create your character, and there are tons of options to choose from, especially colour-wise, as the developers let you select from a nice gradient. Additionally, I was quite pleased to see that they went the extra mile to add inclusivity through "body types" instead of genders and allowing us to choose pronouns! Before we move on, I do want to note that you'll need to choose a username if you want to play with friends online — up to four people can join efforts in a game! — so be wary of what you choose because that will be in your character's name, unfortunately.

Once you're done making the adorable avatar, you're greeted with a quick background story that is a bit vague, as you just find a floating message in a bottle, and while trying to find the place it mentions, you end up shipwrecked in Astoria. This is where the actual playing begins, as Fae Farm doesn't miss a beat before it throws you into action by immediately introducing you to the mayor, who sends you off on a string of quests to acclimate you a bit to the game. 

Fans of farming sims will have this bit down easily, as you just need to clear some of the stuff around your plot and plant some seeds. Merritt (the mayor) will give you a few pointers on how to do things, such as where your warehouse is and how to craft things, and then you'll be on your merry way to meet the cast of characters that will show you the ropes on fishing, bug-catching, and overall game mechanics. At this point, the game’s biggest weakness is quite glaringly obvious for anyone who has played a fair share of life/farm sims, and I’ll touch on that first before I move on to the good parts of the game.

The social aspect of Fae Farm is by far its most boring and bare-bones mechanic, as NPCs have absolutely no life or personality whatsoever. The cast is basically split into two types of characters: those who work as quest-givers/shopkeepers and those who you can romance. You can tell them apart because the ones who own a business stand around day and night in the same spot while the others wander around the town. To make matters slightly worse, aside from having no depth, they also repeat dialogue a lot and even share quotes… or at least, they said it so similarly that I was pretty sure it was the same sentence.

Unfortunately, this problem even extends to one of the most exciting parts about this genre: the festivals. Unlike other farming/life sim games where the special holiday each new season gives you a ton to look forward to, in Fae Farm, there's barely anything to do. You get some special items you can craft and one mission, but that's about it. The characters don't even have any new dialogue; they just hang out near each other to make the area look busier. This really took the wind out of my sails since I didn’t have a big event to look forward to at the end of every season. Thankfully, there’s a balance to it, as there might not be anything fun at the end, but unlike in some other games of the genre where winter is basically null until after the first year, every month is completely playable without a hitch: there’s nothing stopping you from farming and having fun in the snow.

And before we move on to the best parts of Fae Farm, I do want to touch on one last thing: the game is quite bad at giving you proper directions. The Steam page was spot-on in its description when it said that you progress at your own pace, as nothing you do is bound to the game’s time. This means that you don’t have to wait until a certain year or month to do something — you are the variable of how quickly you can achieve anything. Although this is fantastic and fun, it also means that it's easy to get lost, and that happened to me… a lot. It wasn’t until I was over 10 hours in that I finally started grasping how things properly worked, and even then, I still didn’t know how to use the in-game encyclopaedia, the Almanac, properly. Thankfully, for those of you who aren’t reviewers, you’ll probably have an easier time since you can just search the web if you get lost.

Now that we’re done with the negatives, let’s move on to everything I loved about Fae Farm. Starting off with me being transparent with you all: I fluctuated with how much I liked the game throughout most of the first 25ish hours. Whilst I started off really disappointed, I eventually got the right pacing and understood the gameplay much better, and that would probably be my very first piece of advice to anyone interested in it: have some patience. It takes a moment to get to the fun bit (at least, it took me a while thanks to my short attention span), but once you do, the game really picks up.

Despite there being no incentive to speak to the characters at all, Fae Farm has a lot to offer in terms of gameplay. Starting off, I'd love to talk about one of my favourite aspects — exploration and world traversal. One of the first things I noticed when I began running around the town was how comfortable it was for me to zoom from point A to point B. The character can jump and swim without a problem, and Azoria is chock-full of adorable mushrooms that will boost you up, helping you take quick shortcuts everywhere. This, paired up with the hidden crafting recipes you can find spread across the world, really brought a sense of wonder and fun to trying to find every nook and cranny in hopes of unlocking a cool new furniture piece. There’s even an achievement to get 100 of them!

It’s safe to say that this kept me busy for quite a while as I acclimated with Fae Farm's style of gameplay, which I eventually understood was much more about crafting, exploration, and discovery than it is about farming and socialising. As an example, although you'll be able to host a bunch of cute animals in your plot and plant a variety of crops, these activities won't eat up your day as they usually do in farming sims (looking directly at you, Stardew Valley); it's very easy to get up, cascade the crops, and run off to have fun, as the cute creatures you can get are quite self-sufficient. This opens a whole ton of hours for you to dive into the dungeon-like mines for the actual fun part.

The game loop is quite simple: you'll be tasked to get to a certain level of the dungeon/mines, and in order to do so, you'll need to learn to craft all sorts of helpful items. Aside from slowly upgrading your equipment to help you out, like in other games of the genre, you'll also need to use magic to keep yourself going. Although this is usually the opposite of my preference — I don't like having to rely on potion-making — I actually had a blast having to discover recipes and collect the ingredients to be able to go deeper and deeper into the levels. 

For those wondering how the magic comes into play, it’s actually quite simple. As you upgrade your items, you’ll be able to use abilities to maximise their usage — for example, the watering can will have a huge splash zone, which makes the morning routine much quicker. Aside from that, as you progress through the main mission, you’ll unlock special powers that will help you clear more areas of the map, such as dissipating the odd black smoke. Although the magic is present primarily through animations and things around the world (like the cute magical animals), you’ll still get to use your abilities in the mines and while opening up new areas. As for the potions, they’ll help you get through obstacles like biting cold or poisonous clouds without a hitch!

This leads me to the title's biggest strength — its fantastic crafting-based progression system. The more stuff you discover and tinker with, the more you can open up all sorts of gameplay mechanics. This means that you might not take as long as I did to get into the fun stuff if you know how to properly use your time and attention, unlike me, who spent a painful amount of time getting sidetracked and making no progress. Pair this freedom of progression with no punishment, and you have a fantastic recipe for hours of entertainment — I never felt penalised for wanting to have fun, and that is fantastic. Whether I forgot to sleep, died from biting more than I could chew, or ran out of energy because I wasn’t paying attention, I never felt like I was being restricted for not following what I was supposed to do. Fae Farm is very generous in many aspects, and it’s one of my favourite things about the game.

This also means that once you hit a certain point in the game, you'll always have something to do, especially if you're a completionist or a collector. Aside from running around gathering all sorts of resources to unlock more crafting recipes or spending a crazy amount of time decorating your massive plot, you can also finish some of the Job Quests. These nifty little missions get progressively more challenging, and as you complete them, you unlock cool items like decor or accessories. This was possibly one of my favourite things to do as it gave me a reason to play around with every skill to get a reward at the end, so I tried to have a Job Quest going alongside my Sisyphean task of trying to stay on track with the main goal. 

And now, on to the issue most people will have — the price. Although it is quite hefty, the game does offer a pretty substantial amount of gameplay. By the time I hit a whopping 30 hours, I only had 48% of the achievements, my house hadn’t been upgraded, I barely had any decoration done, and I had only collected one accessory: a pig nose. This is considering that I went into hyper-focus during a certain bit where I couldn’t wait to get to the other side (out of excitement, of course). I was shocked when I saw how many hours I had wracked up, and I hadn’t even felt them go by. And this is all not counting the two additional expansions coming up in December, which promise to add even more.

I think Fae Farm is one of those games that you either love or hate, depending on what's important to you. Personally, I fell head-over-heels with it once I hit a sweet spot where I had a lot to do; although the lack of social incentive and cool festivals did bum me out at times, I'd usually forget seconds later when I ran off to the next area to unlock more recipes. And even though I spent a lot of time being confused or lost, once I got a nice handle on the game’s pacing, I didn’t need the hand-holding.

There's an enormous plot to decorate, tons of furniture to unlock, a variety of adorable critters to discover, and great fun to be had if you enjoy using magic and potions. Simply put, if you're a crafter and an explorer, welcome home; there's tons for you to do… just don’t forget to check the Almanac.