Welcome to Elderfield Review — A Harvesting Moon

Imagine Stardew Valley forcibly colliding with Halloween Town from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. This delightfully grotesque abomination of a cozy farming sim and casual exposure to unimaginable terrors is the closest thing I could think of to compare to Welcome to Elderfield.

If you’ve played Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, or Fields of Mistria, you’re already aware of the foundation that Welcome to Elderfield has flipped on its head. These are the so-called “cozy farming simulator” games, where the goal is for the player to go day by day building up their farm, interacting with their neighbors, and eventually falling in love in a small community. These games often emphasize the virtues of small-town living and, for many, serve as an escape from the mundane horrors of modern life. After all, who, after spending five or more years in a big city, doesn’t want to escape to a small farm somewhere off-grid, at least for a while?

Welcome to Elderfield still has the farming, the socializing, and the romance, but it replaces the bright and cheery depiction of small-town living with a darker tone, depicting a town like you might find in a Mike Flanagan original series.

Taking the cozy farming sim and injecting a horror twist isn’t a brand-new concept, but I have yet to see a title do it quite the way that Welcome to Elderfield does. In Welcome to Elderfield, the horror isn’t a twist; it’s not something that sneaks up on you or slowly builds throughout the game, but it is instead an ever-present and pervasive reminder that the town of Elderfield is not right. You may be surprised to discover that your neighbor is a twenty-foot-tall skeleton, or that the mall is inhabited by mindless zombies that will attack you on sight, or even that some homes have tentacles bursting from the walls, but to your neighbors it’s just another part of life. It’s a sort of mundane horror that doesn’t subtract from the fear, but almost makes it all the more terrifying that the frights you face are so normalized.

It also creates an incredibly unique setting to explore, both visually and narratively. You literally never know what to expect with each day you start in Welcome to Elderfield, and I can easily say that as far as settings go, this is my favorite of the genre. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has read my past reviews, which reveal how much of a horror freak I truly am.

For genre veterans, all of the familiar mechanics are here. A social system with characters to romance, farming, mining, and crafting all present themselves in a familiar fashion in Welcome to Elderfield. While there are minor changes to the mechanics, none are so radical that genre fans would get lost navigating these systems should they decide to give Welcome to Elderfield a try.

One somewhat radical change is that your farm and your house are separate locations in Welcome to Elderfield. See, in this game, you don’t actually own a farm, but instead live in an old, crummy house in a small town and work for the local farmer. While I initially found traveling to the farm every morning to be a little tedious, I soon came to the opinion that the proximity of the farm, mine, and blacksmith to each other was convenient enough to overcome this small detour that you normally wouldn’t make.

There are a number of small new mechanics in Welcome to Elderfield that aren’t present in other titles in the genre, but one major one is the inclusion of turn-based combat, which triggers when you run into one of the game’s many monsters. This, in my opinion, is an incredible addition to the genre, one that makes combat a lot more fun and interactive than it is in many other similar games. Collecting and upgrading your weapons and armor becomes much more important with the looming threat of entering into intense turn-based combat, especially when death means you restart your day minus a bit of gold.

If there were aspects of the game I were to complain about, they would be the somewhat trivially difficult challenges imposed by game design decisions. For example, mining in the caverns of the game comes with the risk of randomly taking damage from “debris hitting you in the face,” a mechanic I’m pretty sure you can avoid with your luck stat, but it simply felt annoying and tedious to have it included in the first place. When sleeping, you can be forced into a combat encounter which, if you lose, will rewind time a bit. If you go to bed without healing, which is to say if you forget to take the extra step to walk to your bath and heal (because sleeping itself does not heal you), this can be problematic. Again, this mechanic is sort of annoying, requiring you to take an extra step at the end of your day for optimal efficiency.

Overall, Welcome to Elderfield surprised me with its deliciously horror-filled take on the farming sim genre. All of the familiar mechanics are here, just presented in a world far more interesting than anything else I’ve seen from the genre. If you’re a grim soul, fascinated by macabre tales, or if your idea of retiring to the countryside comes with elder gods and unexplainable anomalies, then Welcome to Elderfield is the perfect game for you.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Welcome to Elderfield. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Welcome to Elderfield is available on Steam.