Mirthwood Review — Dark Fantasy Freedom

Mirthwood is an open-world farming sim that sees you escaping feudalism into a land of true freedom, where only your ability to farm, fight, and trade determines your survival. Hardly my first farming game, I was intrigued to find a title in the genre with a dark fantasy setting—one I’ve yet to see a farming sim pull off. Though it took a while, I found myself immersed in Mirthwood and can honestly say it’s one of my new favorite farming sims.

Mirthwood…takes some time to open up.

Beyond the somewhat lengthy tutorial, the game features a lack of direction that can make starting out intimidating. Beyond a few simple starting quests (with many relying on your sense of direction instead of map pointers or guided paths), Mirthwood doesn’t tell you what to do or how to do it. Once you have some basic tools and have planted some crops, what you do next is totally up to you.

While I struggled with this at first, I quickly began to appreciate this choice. Basic systems took a few minutes to figure out, but I realized that the only thing keeping me from doing something was gathering the necessary materials. Before long, my homestead was taking shape, and the sense of accomplishment and pride I felt when I bought my first chicken is hard to understate.

There are many different crafts to master, from farming and cooking to mining, blacksmithing, and even combat. While each benefits from time spent in another (cutting down trees is easier with a better axe), you can generally focus on the craft(s) you prefer. I put more effort into mining and refining metal than the other trades, with copper bars selling at a premium.

That being said, I’d recommend against playing Mirthwood as a fighter or roaming adventurer. While there’s a lot to see, the combat is underwhelming in complexity, and I found it annoying to make it work with the game’s 2D plane. I’d often run up to an enemy, swing, and miss for reasons I wasn’t sure of.

With all the different trades, Mirthwood introduces a cool leveling system that rewards you for doing what you enjoy.

Basically, as you perform tasks corresponding to the different skills, you gain experience points. As you level up in a trade, you unlock small bonuses, such as a chance to harvest more wood or ore. Further on, you gain access to cards that offer powerful benefits and can be slotted a handful at a time, letting you build your character to best perform homestead tasks.

Mirthwood is, more or less, an open-ended farming sim where you don’t have to worry about much beyond your farm, its crops, and selling them to the local market. It’s similar to many other farming sims in that regard. Like those other sims, it also features quests and NPC interaction to mix things up when you’re not farming or waiting for crops to grow.

The quests in Mirthwood, however, can be a bit tricky to navigate.

A huge part of this is due to the dialogue system. When speaking to a new villager related to a quest line for the first time, you get a text prompt with unique dialogue and responses to guide you through the quest. This will be information like, “Oh, go grab x from y location.” Fairly straightforward.

Unfortunately, once that interaction is complete, the dialogue is replaced with Mirthwood’s interaction system, replacing the written dialogue with cards offering to cheer, jest, or romance the NPC.

Thankfully, some quests offer waypoints (though they were hard for me to notice, blending in with the colorful map), but I still found it frustrating that I couldn’t have the information repeated, especially when it was gone to make room for a simplistic relationship system I didn’t use.

Mirthwood’s interaction system lets you have positive, negative, or even romantic interactions with any NPC (except those trying to kill you). While interesting in theory, this system replaces any actual written dialogue, leading to meaningless bouts of one-line descriptors with every interaction. Basically, no character has any real personality unless a quest gives them a temporary script, which, in my opinion, negates the purpose of having any relationship with them.

While more a matter of taste, I wasn’t in love with the art style. Charming, sure, cute, definitely, but I found it didn’t totally match the game’s vibes, and the 2D plane often made things difficult to navigate, like with the combat I mentioned.

Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Mirthwood is available on Steam.