Homestead Arcana Review

Homestead Arcana is a basic, by-the-books farming sim/adventure videogame published by Skybound Games and developed by Serenity Forge. In it, you play as a witch trained in agricultural magic. Set in a world where the planet has been enveloped by a thick purple fog called the Miasma, people have had to flee to the seclusion of mountain tops. Now that your character is old enough to live on their own, you travel to an empty mountain — with your companion, best friend and guide Huckleberry, a black cat who gives you helpful tips. Along the way, you begin to travel into the fog with a helpful plague mask to recover useful items, blast, or repair damage from the fog, and uncover possessions from your family. But you’ll be spending most of your time tending to plants.

Farming in Homestead Arcana is broken up into three parts. Planting seeds can only be seeded into specific soil — starting the game with a ring of dirt around a tree. Other fields can become usable after filling fissures with a particular fertilizer. Once in the ground, you must water and channel life essence into the roots, enriching as well as enhancing growth. Basic fertilizer will also do the trick. And lastly, claiming yields from your produce. After you get to part three, you only need to water and pick your produce for the rest of the game.

Not counting main missions, Homestead Arcana is what you’d expect a farm sim has to offer in the quests department. You are mailed in — by black birds — a shopping list to fill out along with plenty of storyline missions. Some items can be found in the non-miasmic fields behind the farm, while others have to be crafted and cooked. Every now and again, the same guy who brought you to the mountain will land to pick up the packages, as well as buy and sell products to you.

The miasma can be roughly explained as the dungeon/mine aspect of farming games. Travelling through the Miasma can be done pretty much on your first day, however, you’ll have to hold your breath without a mask. The mask begins with a three minute air supply — upgradable through an item bought from the shops — and will last long enough to thoroughly explore the first two open areas. As the Miasma has slowly crept up the mountain, other settlers have had to flee their homes and crops, leaving behind remnants of their past.

Produce and items can be recovered for profit, however, if you are knocked out, the items are lost forever. To make sure nothing happens to you, you can bring food and drink — each replenish your health and mana levels — as well as crafted potions that help find items, and the monsters that live within it. Other obstacles will be fallen rocks and walls of thick vapour, blocking you from venturing further. To get to the new areas, blockages can be blasted apart, or you’ll have to grow miasma-resistant plants called dust eaters to clear dense fog walls. Once open, you also unlock new missions and tasks related to the open region.

From the game’s cover to the screenshots, Homestead Arcana seemed to be an above average farm simulator with a magical twist. But the endocarp (what you call the inside of fruit and vegetables) of Homestead Arcana is bland to say the least. My goal when playing was to get to the point where you can upgrade your home. After playing for a few hours, I was fine living out of the starter tent and stopped playing altogether.

It tries to be cutesy while having little to no charm backing it. And where its good qualities lay, it is only because it was copied from better games in the genre. For starters, Homestead Arcana has cel-shaded graphics, but it doesn’t make the game look any good, and not because they designed it to be so but because other farm-life simulators have cel-shaded graphics. The game’s front cover has a better looking aesthetic than the game itself, so if the developers were to strictly stick to something like it, instead of the lifeless characters and flora, Homestead Arcana could have kept me playing for a bit longer.

Homestead Arcana also has a similar issue when it comes to music. On paper, strumming and picking guitars to express farming sounds — mixed with synths and pianos — sounds interesting. But the reason why guitars and farming coalesce is because of the Midwest United States being the home of farming and country. If the developers were taking inspiration from that group, wouldn’t it be better for the accompaniment to have bluegrass or mountain folk instruments. I know there’s a violin in some of the tracks.

Not to end this review on negative criticism, there are some interesting things which hooked me on my first hour of play. Like produce in the shape of animals, how you farm, and the fact that Homestead Arcana is the first game where you pluck rusted metal from a bush. However, I cannot recommend Homestead Arcana unless you really like farming games or have nothing else to play, which I highly doubt.