Fae Farm is a game with many assets and mechanics to keep you busy for hours.
Developed and published by Phoenix Labs, Fae Farm is a roleplaying, life, farming, simulator game with some added adventure, far from the genre of their prior game title, Dauntless, a massively multiplayer online action fighting game where players can fight and harvest monsters of interesting gear and weapons.
However, Fae Farm is far from the ongoing grind of hunting terrible beasts and making new gear in Dauntless. Fae Farm brings you to a peaceful grind of mining, growing, and cross-breeding for plants, along with meeting some interesting characters along the way.
Starting your Fae Farm adventure, you are taken to character creation, where you must make your adventurous farmer with tons of features to choose from and edit everything from hair colors to eyes, facial builds, voices, and body types.
Although Fae Farm has many options for character design, the interface for the creation and main gameplay feels sort of like playing on the Wii with you creating your character like an avatar for the Wii console.
After having made your character, your character goes into a first-person dialogue, which is all written, as the only voice acting the NPC and characters have are sounds, although they are more like sounds you would hear in the Sims than actual words.
Heading into the cutscenes, your character explains how he/she found a mysterious message in a bottle that invites you to a faraway land that the author of the letter describes as an island in need and one like no other as a home for the brave, and your character sets off with adventure in their heart and the wind behind them in search of this mysteriously alluring island.
With a dangerous voyage, your boat shatters, leaving you clinging to the wreckage of your ship. Suddenly, the waters clear, and you see the mysterious island of Azoria. Once you get to the island, you are given a prompt to talk to the first NPC of the game, who is also a trapped tenant of the island, as the island is surrounded by whirlpools. This gets explained later in the conversation between you and Merritt.
Merritt is the first NPC you meet on the island, a happy and eager woman who is also the mayor of the town and the one to explain the situation to you. Going into detail about how you got there, you are informed that you are the only one who came looking for the island and that there is a vacant home for you to nest in.
After handing you a map, you are tasked to claim your lovely new farm and open the welcome package given to you by the mayor to locate your new home. Heading to your new farm, you will be given the freedom to roam where you would like to.
If you can jump on it, you can get to it; Fae Farm is riddled with blueprints all over, from pillars to mountains and unexpected places. You can most certainly find all sorts of schematics or blueprints that can be used to decorate your home and give it a range of appealing decorations.
However, for the parts taken over by shadows and thorns, you will have to wait to explore there, as those need to be unlocked with new features that come in later chapters. First off, you will need to progress through the first chapter, which will explain the basics of clearing and collecting materials, as well as explain some mechanics of the tools you will be using.
Alongside your everyday tools, such as shovels, axes, pickaxes, sickles, watering cans, and a critter net, aside from the basic tools, you will need to upgrade them as you progress to gain access to other materials of higher value.
You will also come across basic camp mechanics, such as the cooking fire, which can be used to prepare meals and much-needed supplies for health and energy. Keep an eye out for your mailbox, as it is where most of the relationship quests and main story quests are received.
Aside from farming, the game also houses a few extra features, such as a relationship system; however, this system comes with a more realistic twist as you have to keep talking and giving gifts to the NPC of interest to keep your relationship bar up, as ignoring them will lower the bar, much like a dating sim.
Alongside fishing and catching critters, domesticating animals, and selling many different items to the town’s people for some much-needed money, which will help you get more blueprints, seeds, and home decorations, along with some character cosmetics.
Although Fae Farm is a mysterious farming game filled with magic and an intriguing storyline, most of the magic and mystery will only come along in later chapters, such as chapter four or five, giving you some magical skills as well. Although some skills are Area of Effect (AoE), these skills are primarily used to combat the shadows and thorns.
The game is also divided into chapters; getting through these chapters can get somewhat repetitive and become a real grind when you need to get to the next level. This is because most of your main quests require you to build a specific station to craft certain items to advance.
The most notable aspect of Fae Farm is that when you do reach the magic and Fae part of the game, it will be everything you’ve done in the normal world, just dressed up in Fae magic. To give an example, instead of normal plants, you will now get Fae plants, which, in the end, just feel like the game repeats itself in a new skin.
As for combat, Fae Farm primarily has you whacking the enemies with a staff rather than having you cast a spell. However, there is a combat spell you can learn, even though it doesn’t harm them as much as just pushing them away. The game has a cozy and warm setting in its environments, which are affected by the seasons, giving Fae Farm an overall pleasing look and making it lean towards more relaxed gameplay.
As for the seasonal aspects of the game, this makes the farmer part a little bit more realistic, as with certain seeds, you will have to wait for the right season to plant them. Plants like the Apricot tree will only bear fruit in the Spring, so you’ll need to bear in mind which plants will grow in which season. Granted, some plants grow during any season, so you’ll have options to choose from, at least.
As you progress, you will also unlock more farms. Though these would be the farms for multiplayer, they can be used in solo mode for more farm space in your original homestead. The great thing about this is that you can also label your homes for specific cultivations, such as dedicating two farms to Fae resources or even going all in by having singular farms for specific plants and materials alone.
Overall, Fae Farm is a warm and cozy, somewhat grindy kind of game, with tons to do and hours to create your dream home and ideal farms. Although the game is really well polished in regards to the environments and gameplay, the game does just feels like a 3D Stardew Valley clone.
Certain aspects of the game are incredibly similar to ConcernedApe’s iconic farming sim, both in terms of Stardew Valley’s mechanics and gameplay, just dressed in a fae-themed tutu. Many other cozy farming games, such as Homestead Arcana, have tried their hardest to differentiate themselves from their inspirations; this doesn’t seem to be the case with Fae Farm.
