Nowadays, you can’t throw a stick at an indie or wholesome showcase and not hit a farming sim of some kind, which will then take that stick and craft it into a tool or weapon. There seems to be an endless production line of titles in the genre, all battling for your money and attention, striving to reach the heights of Harvest Moon, Rune Factory and Stardew Valley. So how did Phoenix Labs, the studio behind the monster-hunting action role-playing game Dauntless, aim to set their newest game apart in this crowded space? With a little bit of magic.
Fae Farm sees the player’s character wash up on the shores of Azoria, a magical island that is besest by whirlpools, stopping anyone from leaving or coming to the island. After being given a house and farmland, players will tend to crops and rear animals, search dungeons and learn more about the magical island.
While none of the Koalaty Critics would rate it above the big dogs of the genre, Fae Farm does enough to stand out from the pack with some streamlining of the usual farming sim tasks with magical abiliteis making farming chores much quicker. With a solid main quest and interesting setting, theres a lot to like about Fae Farm, although many Critics had issues with performance on Nintendo Switch (before release) and found that certain aspects of the game weren’t as deep as they would like. The critics were also unable to play the game with multiplayer prior to launch, a feature that appears to be the preffered method of play.
Fae Farm is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch
Here’s what Australian critics are saying about the game.
Here’s what Australian critics are saying about the game.
KOALATY CRITICS – AUSTRALIAN CRITICS
Checkpoint Gaming – 7.5/10 (Bree Maybe)
Fae Farm adds a lot of great quality-of-life improvements to the farming sim genre and makes magic with its soft and comfy art style. It’s unfortunate that it falls short in a few important areas such as the interactions you can have with NPCs, because the rest of the game is incredibly solid.
GamesHub – 4/5 (Leah J. Williams)
As you enter the town of Azoria, bright-eyed and mostly carefree, you’ll quickly discover Fae Farm is a self-aware adventure. In putting its own spin on the life-and-farm sim genre, Phoenix Labs has developed a game that seems designed to address popular criticisms of its genre fellows
Press Start – 7/10 (Kieron Verbrugge)
As much as I gel with the idea of supplementing the life sim side of things, for example, the dungeons just aren’t that exciting and fighting the Jumbles gets old a handful of floors in, never mind multiple 25-floor gauntlets. The idea is sound but every floor is so similar and each dungeon so long that it gets tedious far too quickly. The same can be said of a lot of the game.
Vooks – 4/5 (Brad Long)
The story is not as gripping as your usual fantasy RPG, though it was enough to keep things from getting overly repetitive and boring. As someone who has been turned off by so many farming simulators doing the same thing with a different aesthetic, this was very welcome.
Read the review.
WellPlayed – 8.5/10 (Mark Isaacson)
Throughout my journey I found myself appreciating the colour and relaxation of Fae Farm arguably more than most of the other games of the same blueprint.
Koalaty Critics
Aggregator Score
