All posts tagged in Life Simulation
Sep 13, 2023
I’ve previously played the cute Everdream Valley, and written a review. At the time, the game was far from a finished product. It was pretty empty and had some other issues. Even as I wrote the review, the devs, Mooneaters, added some features that improved the quality of life of the game. And now, they’ve released a roadmap of new features they intend to work on implementing!
October Update
October brings a great update that includes fast travel! One of my chief complaints was how big the Everdream Valley map is, making adventuring a little tiresome because running everywhere was the only option. The developers have been listening, though, and fast travel is certainly an exciting new addition that will improve the game. The fun doesn’t stop there, though. You’ll get access to a new lawnmower tool that allows you to tidy up lawns and hedges. Which sounds like a great way to further decorate and personalize your farm. You’ll be getting new plants to decorate with too! Add some charm and vibrancy to your little farm with a riot of natural colors.
Then there’s my favorite part. A Halloween event! Get spooky with fun new items and decorations. Even get dressed up in costumes. I can’t wait for that. There’s nothing like making your home cozy with pumpkins and ghosts. Perhaps the best update, however, if the addition of multiplayer! That’s right, you and your friends will be able to team up to play Everdream Valley together. There’s no word now on how many people can play in multiplayer as the feature is currently in beta, but even just making it two players would be great.
Roadmap
As for the rest of the intended updates, here’s the list straight from Everdream Valley’s Steam page:
- Sep 7, 2023
Welcome to White Ash harbor! This beautiful little seaside town is your new home, and once was a thriving tourist destination. Now, it’s up to you to help revive the town using your experience as a traveling chef. In Chef RPG, you’ll run your very own restaurant to serve up delicious dishes in order to attract tourists back to town. Hunt, harvest, and shop for the ingredients you’ll use in your cooking. Build a thriving restaurant and become a successful chef!
Chef RPG is an open-ended RPG so you get to choose how your story plays out. You’ll get to decide how to expand your restaurants as well as befriend the local townspeople. Will you become a master chef and create the most fabulous tasting dishes? Or will you be a renowned adventurer who impresses customers with rare ingredients, instead? Perhaps you’ll be the chef who networks with friends and customers to build a thriving business through charisma and influence! Whichever route, it’s all yours to choose.
Release Date
Unfortunately, Chef RPG does not currently have a release date. It’s simply listed as “coming soon”. However, you can find it on Steam now to add to your Wishlist!
Want more cooking fun? Check out my review of Yum Yum Cookstar! Plus, check out Epic Chef!
- Aug 9, 2023
Trade Tales opens with you winning a small farm lot in a brand new town through a lottery. You’re eager for a fresh start and decide to take this opportunity to prove yourself and build a new life. You’ll embark on an exciting journey in a brand new town rich with culture. Forge new friendships, assist the locals, and even discover your unique talents. Then, take time to explore different skill sets that can earn you money like fishing, farming, foraging, and mining.
But Trade Tales seeks to set itself apart from all the other life sims out there by allowing you to craft your own experience, and it just might achieve that. Along with the usual farming and fishing, you’ll be able to engage in trading, offering services, applying for jobs, or even start your very own business! You can then use your money to upgrade your home or invest in other businesses. Here’s the list of business opportunities you’ll find in the game:
The unique features don’t stop there, though. Trade Tales has set an ambitious goal of setting themselves apart, and they haven’t skimped on the features to do it. There is a smart AI dialogue system that allows you to chat with NPCs as if they’re real people. This allows you to experience captivating conversations that have endless possibilities. You won’t find the same set of recycled lines every time you speak to an NPC.
You’ll even have access to modern tools like smartphones and computers, cameras, and drones. All of which will aid you in your Trade Tales journey. The smartphone comes with useful apps that allow you to communicate, research, shop, navigate, and more. Plus, the mines offer a challenging puzzle experience instead of the mind-numbing repetition of breaking rocks.
Trade Tales will have unpredictable outcomes that add a bit of realism to the game. Business endeavors may not always yield profit, and mismanagement can lead to the closure of your business. You might even lose your entire field of crops to a super typhoon. Fall in love and even have romantic rivals, adopt pets, or even win the lottery. There’s so much to do!
Whatever you choose to do, and however you end up playing, Trade Tales promises a unique gameplay with the ability to lead your own life. Even when you finish the main story, there’s more for you to do and experience!
Coming to PC and Switch
Unfortunately there’s not release date information for this great game. However, it is supposed to come to PC and the Nintendo Switch. Hopefully we’ll see it soon! You can find Trade Tales on Facebook to follow along with their development.
Want more life sims? Check out my review for Pretty Princess Magical Garden Island!
- Jul 27, 2023
Create the City of Your Dreams
Heard of the Story? is all about forging your very own medieval town. With the help of your townspeople, you’ll embark on an adventure to transform a few sticks and pebbles into a beautiful, flourishing city. Or, you can sit back and watch as the townspeople live and thrive on their own!
All of the villagers in Heard of the Story? are highly intelligent AI who really feel alive and self-aware. Not only will they help you build your city into the perfect cottagecore village or bustling castle town, but you can watch as they discover their own passions, spread rumors, and even tell some interesting stories to each other. You can even form friendships with them.
In order to build up your dream city, you’ll need to cooperate with your villagers in gathering resources. Explore the mountains and forests beyond the city to find fruits and treasures, as well as other profitable items. Heard of the Story? even lets you discover and nurture your own craft! Discover new recipes through some creative genius or learn from the villagers. Specializing into a role, such as blacksmith, opens up new necessary items for you and your city. Once you’ve mastered the trade, perhaps start your own guild, too!Coming Soon!
Heard of the Story? is coming to Steam and will be available August 17th.
The Wandering Village and Gourdlets are a couple of other great city-builders!
- Jul 20, 2023
Pretty Princess Magical Garden Island is the sequel to Pretty Princess Party, and just as cutesy, magical, and pretty as the other. Only this time, you play as a princess who’s trying to revitalize a once flourishing island. You have full control over designing the island, as well.
Raise livestock to receive animal products to use in recipes. Grow crops and flowers. Manufacture other necessary items to craft beautiful dresses, hair styles, makeup, and decorations. Complete requests from visitors to earn money and points that level you up. You’ll unlock new buildings, decorations, and wearables as you level.
Decorate and Garden and Decorate Some More!
Pretty Princess Magical Garden Island looks a lot like Animal Crossing, honestly. You’re on an island that you get to design and decorate. You’re in charge of fixing it up without help, and there’s fruit picking and fishing to be done. Even the look of the map is Animal Crossing-esque. However, Garden Island successfully set itself apart, I think.
There’s mining, farming, even animals to look after, and you have functional craft houses and restaurants that produce different kinds of food. There’s a functional element to the game that gives me a reason to play beyond just decorating. Garden Island’s livestock aren’t needy, they’re simply a building you place, you feed them, then they produce items. Farming is easy, too. You buy seeds, plant them, and wait! There’s a cute little chime that plays when a crop grows to maturity, too. So don’t go into this thinking you’ll have a Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon experience. You won’t. It’s just what ACNH should have done with crops.
There is a timer to making items, however. The base time is five minutes, though they can be up to ten minutes. These timers apply to crops, the animals, crafting buildings, and restaurants. When I first encountered this mechanic, I thought it would get annoying fast. That wasn’t the case, though. I found that there’s enough to do around Garden Island that I’d get swept up in something else and not even realize five or ten minutes had passed.
The best aspect, and probably the main aspect of Garden Island, though, is the decorating. Decorate yourself, change your hair, slap on some makeup and hair bows, then go pretty up the island. It’s almost overwhelming how many incredible options for decorating there are. From pretty and cutesy to gothic, to normal garden and cottagecore styles, you shouldn’t have trouble picking out the perfect pieces to use. The excitement of this is a little offset by the need to craft dyes and other materials to use to buy the decor. However, you can place multiple of one building to have a whole crafting set-up going so it’s really not a huge issue.
Final Thoughts
Despite the minor gripes, I really, really enjoy Pretty Princess Magical Garden Island. It’s fun and simple and forgiving. I can pick it up for a little while to fill some time, or I can marathon it all day. I can create beautiful water themed areas or spooky gothic and Halloween displays. Or, if I’m feeling in the mood, deck the whole place out in bright pinks befitting a pretty princess. The purposeful crafting and fulfilling order really gives me a sense of accomplishment, too. It makes me want to play because I have to earn levels to unlock more stuff, and craft items to get that stuff.
Overall, I give this one:
You can find Pretty Princess Magical Garden Island on Nintendo Switch!
- Jul 12, 2023
I recently wrote about Go-Go Town here, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting its release since discovering it. It’s absolutely adorable with its sweet-looking character designs and delightful building designs. Couple that with the town revitalization and management, it looks to be the perfect cozy game.
And it is!
I’ve had a chance to playtest Go-Go Town, much to my delight. Not all features are available in this playtest. It’s more like a limited demo, but what is in the playtest has me hooked already. You’re dropped into this run-down town as the new mayor, and taught a few things on how to play, then it’s up to you to restore this beautiful little place.
You run around, or hop on a bike, or even drive a little pickup truck, collecting materials needed to build new buildings. Eventually you can unlock tools to make rebuilding in Go-Go Town even easier. Chainsaws for cutting wood, drills for collecting stones, and crab pots for passive fishing will help free up your time so you can build new homes, fun shops and restaurants, and attract even more residents faster. And as you get residents to move in, you can assign them to different jobs to make production even easier. Go-Go Town even has a farm plot where you’ll grow crops, care for animals, and use all the items you harvest there to stock your shops with fresh, homegrown ingredients.
I have loved the cuteness of the game, as well as the coziness of it. It’s been fun rebuilding a whole town how I want it. I can’t wait to see what more comes to this game, too!
You can find Go-Go Town on Steam, where you can Wishlist it to keep an eye out. Unfortunately, there is no release date at this time.
Want more building? Take a look at Tiny Glade!
- Jul 12, 2023
A Cute Colony Sim That Takes Place Over the Ocean
Havendock is a resource management and colony sim where you find yourself on a single square of a pier. You need to gather resources as they float by in the ocean’s current in order to expand your living space. You’ll also build new facilities to help make your life on this pier more comfortable. Arrange your facilities where you wish, catch fish and grow crops for food, and even manage new settlers as they arrive. You can assign them to specific jobs to make operations much easier, but make sure you have enough food, water, and shelter for them!
And it’s recently received a great new update!
Cows, Birds, and More!
You can now visit Cow Island and speak to Josh to add the adorable cow to your list of animals. Feed them to receive milk, which can be turned into cheeses and desserts for your settlement to enjoy. You can also visit Bird Island where you’ll find Mother Kewi, a large bird who will help repopulate Bird Island. Once you rebuild her nest she’ll appear, and you can customize her colors, complete quests for her, and feed her. She’ll repopulate the island with tiny Kewi, who will carry resources back to your island. You can even take a ride on Mother Kewi!
There’s even more to enjoy, too. You can now access an abandoned fishing village. It was once a village full of life, but now it’s up to you to revitalize it. Rebuild necessary buildings and recruit new fishermen. You’ll need their services to create a sustainable way to feed fish to the birds, after all. When you’ve done that, hop into the water to discover the mysteries of the crash. Use your bots to clean the area, drill for minerals, and investigate the wreckage. Even attract a new doctor NPC by shooting off a flare.
Havendock now has The Cave, where you can explore and fight slimes. To access The Cave, visit Bird Island and find the door. Fighting slimes will reward you with slime bubbles, which can be used to make desserts or combat gear. This portion of the update is bare bones at the moment, and the developers are looking for suggestions on equipment, upgrades, etc to improve the area.
Find Havendock on Steam now! It is in Early Access, but receives great updates regularly. For another colony sim, check out my review of One Lonely Outpost.
- Jul 6, 2023
It’s no secret: Stardew Valley is my favorite cozy game; it’s possibly my all time favorite. I’m eagerly, and impatiently awaiting the release of Haunted Chocolatier, too. Until then, I’m always on the lookout for the next great farming sim. There are some great ones out there, and many more coming out that have potential. One Lonely Outpost was definitely one I’ve had my eye on for a while. Cozy farming sim where you restore the dying planet to its lush former glory and establish a brand new colony of people? Sign me up! Except, it didn’t quite live up to my expectations.
The Good
You can find One Lonely Outpost on Steam, and it is undoubtedly cute, and getting to restore the planet, while watching the flora and fauna slowly return is heart-warming. I enjoy the feeling of accomplishment from rebuilding the world into something liveable for my character and the NPCs. Getting to live on a planet that isn’t just some carbon copy of Earth, but actually feels like a surreal, alien planet is perfect. It immerses you into the story more, and makes the game just different enough, but with familiar elements.
What I really enjoyed was that sprinklers unlock early game. I can ramp up my farming almost immediately because of this, and ended up building a sprawling farm. There’s no endless struggling to complete tasks for in-game months while fighting your tiny amount of energy. Plus, it doesn’t feel like an end-game condition or after-thought. I can’t express enough how happy I was to get those sprinklers early.
The Bad
I know I just praised the sprinklers, but I have to also express how clunky they are. You have the sprinkler itself, which only waters crops within a specific radius of the sprinkler head. That’s normal and common in farming games. However, One Lonely Outpost also requires you to have a water pump placed near a water source, which will then provide water for the sprinklers to water crops. Then, you need solar panels to power those pumps. And each item has a specific range, so to cover a wide area, you’ll need multiples of each. Luckily, you can place a water pump by a water source, then place another water pump within the area of the first, and daisy chain the pumps to cover an area. However, if you’re wanting an aesthetic farm plot, it’s going to take some real planning.
The map is another problem for me. It’s SO low tech. You’re over here crafting food processors, forges, and water pumps from parts, but your map only shows you a broad overview of the One Lonely Planet world. It doesn’t zoom into the specific spot in a region you’re in. It doesn’t have visuals so you can find the paths to other regions. You just have to guess, and really commit the place to memory. Nevermind not having icons for the NPCs, which is fine. Stardew Valley does the same, and that was workable. It just feels a little silly that we’re building a brand new colony with solar panels and cooking stations we’ve crafted, but the map is basically useless.
The Ugly
Fishing is usually my least liked activity in farming sims, because they’re often just annoying. Stardew Valley, for example, has got to be my least favorite fishing activity. It gets easier with practice and new items, but it’s often the skill I ignore when I play. However, the fishing mechanic in One Lonely Outpost is perhaps worse than that. You get this cool little fishing drone that you release into a body of water, which initiates a minigame.
You control the drone by moving left or right, and dashing forward to catch a fish. Then, you play a little minigame where you click when the indicator is inside a tiny bar that moves. Sometimes it’s fast, and sometimes you do this up to three times, and this is what determines if you catch the fish. Unfortunately, the drone maneuverability is not on par with the fish. It’s slow and cumbersome, while the fish are swift and swim away if you approach too close. You also need to resurface before the battery runs out, or you lose your drone, forcing you to buy a new one or make a new one. They’re not that cheap, either.
You can buy drones and other items from Linny. Except, Linny is the new Marnie. I think I successfully caught her in her shop twice, maybe three times since she moved to the planet. I imagine she has a specific schedule I just wasn’t able to suss out, but it sure did make buying necessary items from her unduly difficult.
What really bothered me was the glitching. Most of the time, using my bug catching drone bugged the whole game. When it’s out, it shows an area on the round so you can see if you’re close enough to catch a bug. If I had the drone out and walked to a new region, that area disappeared and I just had to guess. Then, it morphed into only showing up when in one specific region. This issue also caused the areas shown for sprinklers, water pumps, and solar panels. So, I struggled to rearrange my farm unless I did it first thing when turning on the game and before I ever used my bug catching drone.
Final Thoughts
It has potential, and some of my complaints are more personal preference than a problem with the game. However, there were enough problems that I just didn’t vibe with the game. One Lonely Outpost is in Early Access, though, so there is hope that it has the wrinkles ironed out and it improves. I truly hope it does, too, because I enjoyed the atmosphere of it. Until then, I rate it:
You can check out some of my other reviews, too! Roots of Pacha, DREDGE, and Ooblets are all great cozy games I’d recommend!
