The hustle and bustle of city life can grow tiring. Our daunting day-to-day in modern society can easily make one yearn for the simpler life of a homestead farmer, and I can only imagine that thousands of years into the future, this will only be doubly true. Enter Farlands, a game not only about escaping into the wilderness but one with ships, matter fabricators, and other futuristic tech to give your homesteading a sci-fi edge.
If you’ve played Stardew Valley, then Farlands should feel very familiar to you. Like so many other titles, Farlands was inspired by the incredibly popular Stardew Valley. It follows its formula closely, featuring identical mechanics and themes with a sci-fi paint job.
Farlands does, however, add to the formula in a few ways, the most noticeable being space travel and ship customization. The need to travel to other planets gives you more of a purpose for the organic matter gathered in your farming, converting it into fuel for your starship. Farlands also adds some good quality-of-life changes to the familiar genre mechanics.
Something I certainly appreciate about Farlands is how quick and snappy the harvesting is.
If we’re making the Stardew Valley comparison, I invite players of that game to remember how long it takes to harvest a chopped log or rock. Sure, some bits or instant, but for the most part, it takes a good few swings before you can get through most objects. In contrast, Farlands allows you to harvest most objects with the click of a button and with a relatively fast animation, making yardwork fast and snappy and much less of a chore. It’s a relatively small change to the genre, but you really feel those seconds add up when you have a lot of space to clear.
Another little quality-of-life upgrade in Farlands is a three-tiered toolbar. In practice, this is basically your standard inventory size or near, but with the added benefit of having everything in your backpack automatically be on a hot bar. Just like fast mining, it helps save some time where you would otherwise be dragging items to your equipment slots.
When I say Farlands follows Stardew Valley’s themes, I would say it does so to a fault. You will be familiar with the setting pretty fast. You begin the game by purchasing your own planet, which will serve as your farm / buildable area like in Stardew Valley. There’s a local town (on another planet) full of overly friendly faces and a mega-corporation that exploits the environment and threatens to doom the town if you don’t intervene.
Farlands is still early into development, so we don’t have a lot to go on with the story, but I’ll say the setup is so cliche at this point that I was actually disappointed. So many “farming games like Stardew” boxes are checked in the game’s introduction to the setting and story that I could have won an uninspired bingo. I wish these games would stray from the formula more, at the very least, when it comes to story. Not every town has to be wholesome, not every corporation evil, and not every frontier a welcoming escape from the mundane with little to no danger and nothing but basic chores needed to fix it up.
That being said, I will say that Farlands does seem to include some interesting characters. The game’s sci-fi setting allows Farlands to paint its roster with some real variation in its cast, and I’m interested to see where the game goes when / if it gets a real romancing system.
Though I find so much of Farlands to be similar to its Stardew inspiration, to the point where I would nearly call the game cliche and uninspired, it is important to remember that the game is still in Early Access. I do think it has some real promise, and there isn’t anything wrong with the gameplay inspirations it draws from. If they continue to innovate on the genre’s mechanics, Farlands will certainly be a fun title that I sink a lot more time into.
Though more unlikely, I do hope they also stray from some of the genre’s storytelling tropes. Add a little edge to your frontier, and expand on the story beyond “company evil, small town good.” It’s getting a little too familiar for my tastes at this point, but that being said, I have no doubt that many of the genre’s superfans won’t mind the tale at all.
Farlands is interesting and has potential, but I’m afraid my time with the Early Access game was a little shorter than I would have liked. My progress was instantly brickwalled by a pretty serious bug: The money I gained from selling harvested resources wasn’t actually going into my account. That being said, I could see from the scope of available objects that I had neared the end of what is available in this Early Access version of the game.
Farlands seems to have a long way to go before it leaves Early Access and becomes a full game. However, I think it has a lot of promise. If the game interests you and you want to support the developers as they continue to flesh out the game, purchasing it in Early Access definitely isn’t a bad idea. Otherwise, I would give the game time, but I recommend keeping a close eye on it as it evolves throughout its development.
Pros:
- Solid, familiar genre mechanics with good QOL changes
- A fun setting for the genre
Cons:
- The makings of a pretty cliche Stardew-like title, especially when it comes to he story
- Game-breaking bugs and a lack of features in the current EA build
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