FoM takes place in the titular village of Mistria, which had suffered an earthquake not too long ago and now is trying to rebuild itself and its importance within the greater world. To that end, Mistria advertises for an adventurer to move into Mistria’s second farm; naturally, that is you.

This opening is as established as it is tired. There aren’t any very interesting hooks early on, though you are introduced into something that pushed FoM at least a little bit apart from its main comparison Stardew Valley through the integration of magic and a relatively more pronounced experience and skill system. Naturally, the former is also a narrative element and serves as most of the groundwork for the actual major story going on during your stay in Mistria, the second being the aforementioned building up of the village.

FoM does one thing better than virtually all its competition, and that is reactive dialogue by the villagers. There are tons and tons and tons of unique dialogue that directly relate to your activities: Did you just donate a new item to the museum? Did you just have an event with a villager? Did you just repair a house or level up a skill? All of these and more provide you with banter, and it does absolute wonders for keeping the game feeling alive months into its in-game runtime.

So is the quality of the writing just as good as its quantity? No, but it isn’t exactly bad either. It is in a uniquely weird position wherein the actual prose is actually very decent. Characters are written consistently and are largely charming. But they lack an incredible amount of depth simply by virtue of everything being written to be as cozy as possible.

Take, for example, Juniper. She is a witch that has moved into Mistria to explore the local magic and is experimenting (of course with exclusively benign effects) on the villagers under the guise of a bathhouse. I don’t mind that she is not outright evil, though such characters have been done well in the genre before, such as in the case of the Witch of Harvest Moon DS, but rather that she is pushed for a reputation of being snarky, rude, and arrogant, and the writing does attempt to give her this sort of edge but simply fails at doing so. FoM is quite literally incapable of writing rude characters.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3782792206

This criticism is universal. You will go on magic quests to avert cataclysmic events, procure magic scrolls with unknown effects, and scale cliffs to find a flower to create a panacea, but none of this carries any weight due to this inherent flaw in its writing. None of it has actual stakes, and it reflects in the writing that the tone mismatches the events it is portraying, like nothing I have ever seen before.

Ultimately this means that FoM has a cast of charming, completely decently written characters that are all qualitatively better than most other games in this genre but that feel hamstrung by the developers being unwilling to portray friction within their story. This has been done well even in this genre. I think Rune Factory in many ways is the best comparison to FoM, and those games featured death, or the kidnapping of your spouse by magical creatures, and more.

Regrettably, these criticisms extend to the gameplay, though they are expressed in an utter abundance of "quality-of-life" features that, rather than providing comfort to established gameplay systems, instead strip them entirely of their depth.

Farming: You buy seeds, hoe the ground, plant them, water every day, and after a while sell, cook, or gift the crop away. Ranching: You buy a cow, a chicken, or something else; feed and pet them; and do nothing else with them, and on their own, they will drop their produce for you to pick up. Socializing: You talk with villagers and gift them the trash you don’t want once a day, and even if they dislike your item, their friendship won’t decay.

You have seen this a thousand times before, and FoM has absolutely nothing new to offer on this tired old formular. What it does, however, offer is endless streamlining under the guise of quality-of-life. No longer do you actually need an item to get animal produce: It’s automatic. Annoyed by needing to water your crops? You've got spells for that now. Hell, there are entire skills in your skill tree entirely devoted to completely removing player interactions from your farming elements in your game about farming.

I think the one that annoys me personally the most is a trait in the cooking skill tree that makes it so that any dish you make has a (relatively high) chance of becoming affixed with “Loved”, making it a universal favorite gift. This, in particular, sticks out as so enigmatic to me as to why I loathe what the term “cozy” has done to this genre. People will pretend to care about these characters and their romances and their writing but will ask for inclusions such as this to circumvent learning about the character, interacting with them, and building this sort of relationship during their gameplay. What happened since Stardew Valley and the popularization of using “cozy” as a genre term is nothing but a blatant shift to wish-fulfillment, and FoM is the extreme conclusion of it.

The worst aspect of the game hit by this is the combat and the mining. An aspect that, too, has always been woefully underdeveloped in other games in this genre; and here, too, FoM provides absolutely nothing new other than your typical click-and-swing combat with regular enemies that do nothing but a single attack. It isn’t the worst just by being bad; it’s always been like this, and it’s always been bad, but what makes it so jarring is that FoM is polished enough that it shows that the team would’ve had the skill to actually make something unique and to include palpable improvements on a fundamental gameplay system but opted not to attempt it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3784730912

What replaces depth, therefore, is player customization. You may not have any gameplay to your ranching, but at least you can put hats on your cows or whatever. You may interact with the villagers like they are shambling husks, but at least their dialogue is cute and you have an insane variety of decorations to prop up your house with them. I am being a bit mean with this description, as these elements are deep. There are tons of customizations to obtain, and housing is a valid part of the design philosophy of these games, but they are not a replacement.

FoM looks great for its artstyle. Portraits are expressive and each character has a reasonable variety in their artwork to reflect any situation they are in. The same holds true for the environments, which are pretty and undergo great atmospheric changes during the different seasons. The soundtrack is equally great, excelling at environmental tracks but no otherwise outstanding musical pieces.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3784730955

A lot of this review may sound scathing, but I actually do enjoy Fields of Mistria. It is just lamentable how much better it could have been directly because of the clear quality it does have and just misdirected into defanging the little gameplay design the genre still had after undergoing years of continuous lobotomization. Among the modern farming sims, FoM is among the best; there is fun to be had with it as a sort of escapist nightmare, but I could never recommend it for what it advertises itself as: “a farming / life sim RPG”.

Honestly just not for me. I've played for over 100 hours, I wanted to give it a genuine shot. I love Stardew and heard that this was apparently just as good, but honestly, I don't agree. I find certain things with this game to be very clunky, item sorting, storage/chests/combat/cutscences that take an entire day away, etc. I love that you can customize your character and the game looks very pretty. The game does not run super smooth, I feel like everytime I play it I have some kind of issue, getting stuck on walls, lagging severely, items disappearing, (I have made reports regarding these events). The main flaw for me is that I feel like it fails at the main gameplay loop, of getting a quest, collecting a bunch of crap, handing that crap in. This is the exact same as Stardew, but honestly, I find it so tedious in FoM. I feel like the RNG is never on my side in this game, one day i'll see a thousand of this specific bug I need, but then the day I get a quest requesting it, I never see it again. I had had multiple legendary bugs constantly respawning in one day (doesn't feel very legendary when that happens). Also, I don't know if its because I'm spoiled for how well planned the chests are in Stardew, but... I hate the chest system in this game. I feel like I have a thousand chests, and no matter how hard I try to be organized it doesn't matter. In Stardew, I basically have 6 chests total for an entire save, 1 per season, 1 for gems, 1 for misc items. I easily have like 15 different chests in FoM and I haven't even finished the game. Aside from the actual glitchyness or certain things still not being accessible (even after the final big update) this game is fine. In my opinion, no where near as good or thoughtful as Stardew. I'd probably give it a 6/10. Maybe with future updates it will improve my rating idk. I wont recommend it in the state it is in now.

This is a tough 'Not Recommended'.

I bought the game on full release and have put in nearly 100 hours since with basically all achievements completed, minus the one where I have to wait a year for my baby to turn 1. I definitely did enjoy playing the game.

However, the entire time I just get the sense that this game still feels like an early access product. The easiest example of this is the implementation of children - there's one preset baby per romanceable and said romanceable spends the rest of the game with a slapped on .png of the baby, regardless of how ill-fitting it is on the singular pose they have. There's only 1 event per season, and two of them (Spring & Fall) are essentially the same. The story outside of the mines plot (which was fine, but quite short) is basically get 1000x wood, upgrade something, rinse and repeat. Non-romanceables have no cutscenes/heart events whatsoever. The museum wings are just grids of .pngs. There's a dating mechanic that essentially has no dialogue, it's just a short animation and then you get a picture of the date's sprite at that location.

The core gameplay loop is like any other farming sim; it's fun, and there's definitely a lot of QOL. Things like accessing stores at any time, or being able to craft gifts that are loved by all NPCs, or a spell to instantly water your entire farm. Customisation is great, and you can change your appearance any time. It does feel like a double-edged sword, though, because any time something DOESN'T have QOL, you feel it especially hard. For example, crafting something resets the menu every time so you have to scroll alllll the way back down to find whatever it is you wanted.

Museum grinding is horrendous. There are several collections that are extremely RNG-dependent, and if you don't want to spend several in-game years doing so, you're gonna have to soft reset a lot. You might say that you're meant to slowly go through it, but there just isn't anything else to do in the meanwhile. Several collections only get one attempt daily, and there's no way to guarantee it's not a dupe. I reached the point where I'd completed all the other content, so there wasn't really any point in farming/ranching/gifting/chatting, and I'd just sleep immediately after checking the collectible for the day.

There's a ton of dialogue and I didn't see much repeating till Year 3. This is definitely one of the main draws of the game. The characters generally interact a lot with each other and I really liked that, it makes the town feel very lived in. The Friday gatherings were a highlight for me!
I felt like the romanceables felt quite unequal. Some are required for main story progress and have more depth, and some just have a singular personality trait. I didn't particularly mind, though; I feel that it's quite standard for the genre.

There's also very noticeable performance issues. There's very heavy lag when it rains in-game, and the framerate randomly drops even when there isn't. Opening a chest from the inventory lags the game like crazy until I go into a building.

Overall, the game is fine, I just would only recommend playing it in several years' time when more content is added. It's fun as it is, but the whole time, I couldn't shake the feeling that it feels incomplete.

Rushed release/not a finished product.

Numerous small bugs exist, multiple of which you will likely encounter, but more importantly there are obvious things to be developed/added later, including but not limited to: proper baby sprites, and heart events and dynamic/reactive dialogue for non-romanceable characters.

The game has potential to be better than Stardew Valley, just needs a few patches.

Do you know the feeling when you had a work meeting and afterwards said to yourself "this could have been a mail"? This game is kind of like that, but with "this could have been a mod". This game is straight up just a Stardew Valley clone with some minor QoL improvements and more (hollow) NPC's interactions.
Some small pointers about my "frustration" with the game.

NPC's: There is an in-game friday specific event where every NPC meets up at the tavern to socialize. Playing games, doing certain activities, etc. But here is the thing: You are not a part of this. Ever. You will always be an outsider or rather silent watcher and never get the chance to actually interact with the NPC's in a meaningfull way. Either tone NPC interaction down in favor of other systems or double down on your dating sim approach and let the player be more involved.

Economy: By Fall (1st year) you'll be swimming in money with little to no effort in actually trying to make a profit. The selling price of certain items is also all over the place. Animal goods for example or cooked dishes sell for almost not meaningfull profit. So the only real way to make money is just by selling your crops.. or even better: find a blueprint for a decorative variant of a certain crop (like strawberries), turn the crops into decoration via woodworking and sell it for a stupid massive profit. Im at spring (2nd year) as of writing this review and making 50k gold every 3 days with this method.

Mine: The mine started out as a nice adventure, but ended up a very repetetive grind. Descent 20 floors, collect four specific items of the last 20 floors, proceed to the next tier, repeat. Combat doesn't get interesting either. I would even argue, that the sole reason for combat is just to waste your time aka to act as a barrier to artificially slow your progress. Yet the biggest insult is: at the end of the mines your only way to progress is by having two specific NPC's at 8 hearts. Just why?

Events: there are barely any in the game and all of them are lackluster.

I had fun playing the game, because I was excited to discover new stuff or rather waiting for the game to upon up more only to realize that all it's mechanics are rather two dimensional/flat and lack any form of depth. This could be a really good game, but instead of elevating the mechanics that were introduced by the games it draws inspiration from, it just copies them. It lacks any novelty. Hope this changes in future updates.

Since the v1.0 update performance has been majorly throttled, with v-sync set to on/adaptive, gameplay moves at snails pace, your character moves like they have rocks attached to their legs and are wading through quicksand.

With v-sync off there is major screen tearing.

Hoping for a performance update soon. All i want to do is farm and romance a dragon.

I spent now over 100 hours on the game with a minor part of it in early access. I came back to the game after 1.0 Release and gave it another try. Iam now at the end of year one while i did a lot of upgrade missions in the city.

Its a nice farming game that may cure the itch for some the gamers but if you expected something like Stardew Valley or other famous older farming simulations then this may not be the right game for you. Especially when you expect a bit of a challenge to rebuild your farm.

Here are three main problems i have with it:

1. The progression is so unbalanced that it hurts. If you do it right you will be set to finish the game after the first month. You wont have money problems, (After 1 month i run around with 20.000 Gold each week, at the end of autumn i was sitting at 40.000 gold) everything gets thrown at you (especially furniture or cosmetic stuff) that it makes the game boring pretty fast. You days are just running around then and hunt for achievments to unlock more cosmestic stuff and the rest is... just there.

2. This game feels more like a "farm customization" simulatior (with focus on female gamers given how overly pink, cute and flowery everything is) than a farming simulator where you try to rebuild a farm to help the city. I cant count the times i had to go back to the farm because my inventory was swamped with so much cosmestic items that i wasnt able to do anything else anymore. Other than that they basically removed everything that would add a bit of challenge which also would add some more value to the progression aspect,.

3. This game is so focused on "cozy" that it now makes it really boring.

I believe the devs took the word cozy and focused on that aspect so hard that they forgot about what makes a good game in all other aspects. This game was made so simple and easy that i just get bored playing it. They basically looked at other farming simulations and took minor things and said "Yeah thats too much we have to make it more simple" like refilling your watering can. So you have now unlimited water in the can and your optional lifestock (which is only needed for a bit of main quest where you need to get some milk and eggs) cant produce things without being petted. I basically said "Thats it!" when i reached winter now and outta nowhere there is this new Horse statue suddenly in an empty place which just throws a "magical horse" at you for free.

So personally i cant recommend the game at the current state especially when i see so many things while playing (which i cant overlook and thereforse just annoy me). Its due to my faible for developing game conceopts myself and how l love a well balance porgression up to the last year with gameplay elements, story and more.

But thanks to "Fields of Mistria" i finally decided to go for it. While i finish my farming simulation game dev concept i will start now looking into ways to aquire funding for it (private funding / investors / goverment development fundings) - away with cozy. Hello bittersweet!

Two more things:

4. The Mods for this game are basically all about "How can we make this easy game way easier with unlimited Stamina" or similar things. it was the first game where i looked at the mods and thought to myself "Nothing of this is useful for a normal gamer".

5. The community saying "FoM is so much better than Stardew valley which needed 10 years for an incomplete game....." tells you everything you need to know.

FoM feels incomplete after 20+ devs worked 2 years on it and it feels lacking compared to the base version of Stardew Valley which was developed by 1 person in 4 years.

I loved playing fields of mistria, I really did but holy WOW this game has FLAWS.

I was initially excited for mistria, with many of my friends playing it and some even having played it before the v1.0 launch.

The early to mid game is a complete joy to play, with lots of innovations and deviations from the typical farming sim game genre we have come to know over the years.

It's not really until I got to the mid late to late game that the flaws really started to show themselves.

The game adopts a "new is always better approach" when it comes to tools, upgrades and anything else. Which throughout the game, kept me from really caring to engage with certain mechanics.

Why should I get the medium barn/coop, if I can just wait for the large barn/coop, especially when moving the animals is so tedious.

Why should I craft any armour set beyond the final one? The enemies barely pose a challenge and again, since I'm not locked behind upgrading 1 set to every stage, there is no incentive to engage with that part of the game. (Especially if you got the armour dropping perk)

Why should I upgrade certain tools? (looking at you bug net) When it provides absolutely no benefit to doing so and again, progression is not locked behind upgrades?

There are many instances where I did not feel motivated to care. Even FARMING falls under this, which is so silly for a farming sim.

I wondered for a long time as to *why* I wasn't farming nearly as much as in a game like stardew valley and I think I have sussed out the answer.

THE ENERGY

EVERYTHING COSTS SO MUCH ENERGY, WHATS THE POINT OF GETTING BETTER TOOLS, IF IT JUST HELPS ME WASTE MORE ENERGY FASTER. I don't expand my farm because by the time I am done watering what little bit of farm land i have, I AM OUT OF ENERGY.

This could be EASILY be fixed if there was any sort of sprinkler or automation progression but there is no way of automating.

Oh wait, sorry there is, except you only unlock it MIDGAME, AND its super small and limited AND it needs you to farm consumables to keep it going AND cannot be upgraded whatsoever.

It's actually detrimental to start using sprinklers because watering is such a great way of getting essence and I need essence for everything so by using sprinklers the game is basically punishing you by greatly reducing how much essence you get.

I literally don't have the energy to farm, not to mention that there isn't really anything that would cost so much tesserae that I wished I would have more, even by the end. Every community upgrade tessarae event was easily accomplished with just the default 68 tiles, which I increased to a modest 134 tiles, which might sound like a lot, until you consider that I'm still barely taking up any of the not upgraded starter farm that I have.

I got by just fine with this tiny farmable plot of land. There reason I didn't expand it more was that when I did, it was tedious too, because shoveling and hoeing the ground both does and UNDOES the ground you already shoveled and hoed. (This is why in stardew you dig up the ground with the hoe but undo it with the pickaxe, to avoid this very issue) Which just lead to frustrating walking and smacking around with my tools.

Made even more awkward because despite positioning my character, the character SNAPS to whichever ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ four heavenly directions they want, causing me to very often miss my tool use. If my mouse cursor is in FRONT of the character, why would I want to hoe the SIDE?

AND WHY IS MY INVENTORY ALWAYS FULL??? I am constantly filled up with random items, there are so many foragables, crops, dishes, bugs, fish, ores, furniture, artifacts AND TOOLS and its just not enough inventory space. I was genuinely surprised when I got the last backpack upgrade because in no way did I think that I would not be getting at least 1 more row of space.

Not to mention that the chests are completely lacklustre. You need like 3 LARGE chests per season, just to comfortably and clearly sort everything and there is no hot deposit to surrounding chests option which means lots of passing out at 2am after frantically running to each chest trying to dump everything into each correct category of chest I have. (Not to mention that if you craft or cook or make anything with an infusion it takes up ANOTHER inventory slot so good luck)

In addition, there is absolutely no way of moving the chest so if you put one down temporarily, have fun moving everything in that chest one by one to a new location and pray you don't change your mind later. So the inventory management in this game is just a complete nightmare.

Its a collectathon in the worst way, where after you collected something once, it just wont stop bugging you, wasting space, being in the way. The game mitigates this slightly by trying to make all this stuff giftable but I honestly cannot remember which artifact which character likes beyond like 2 or 3, the rest goes into the shipping bin as clutter.

However, despite these gameplay complaints, I still had a grand time up until today. Why? Because the characters are, and the story itself is, so beautiful. It definitely takes the social aspect of the farming sim genre and boosts it into the stratosphere and beyond.

The Friday nights at the inn are inspired and my greatest criticism to those is that there are not enough of them.

But then why do I say, up until today? Because the 8 heart event confession choices suck. I mean it just SUCKS. I didn't realise that if I got a romanceable character to 8 hearts I would have to choose THEN AND THERE, IMMEDIATELY, if I wanted to date them or not, WITH NO WAY OF CHOOSING LATER.

Which is especially stupid since there is a late game story quest that requires you to VIEW 2 ROMANCEABLE CHARACTERS 8 HEART EVENTS TO PROGRESS.

Why can't I just view the event and choose later? Why must it be tied to the NPCs agency and not my own as a player? The characters are so interesting and fun and I want to get to know them on my own terms and not be forced into making a snap decision as soon as I get closer to them.

This is such a huge detriment to the game because this social aspect was doing a lot of the heavy lifting and now it feels like I'm juggling a minefield of heart events (unless I choose to ignore their letters, except MARCH ofc)

(The rest of the complaints I have for the social aspect are just related to how good it is. More dialogue, more events, more Friday nights, more heart events and so one, not really a bad thing. (unless its never updated))

Idk, so many of the games aspects just feel disjointed and underutilised. Farming, Fishing, Ranching, its all sort of worthless. What do you get out of it? Farming gets you more than enough money. Fishing and ranching just feel like inventory cloggers. + its all just so stamina draining, which never improves because again THE TOOLS JUST WASTE ENERGY FASTER. It really feels like I'm being punished rather than rewarded for being further along in the game.

- Better tools should NOT increase stamina costs.
- Fish should NOT take more stamina depending on the Fish size.
- Ranching NEEDS to be more lucrative because farming outshines it.
- Terrariums and apiaries should NOT require foragables, I already had to craft, collect and fill in all the bugs and now I'm locked out of the reward cause I didn't collect enough f*cking nettle.
- Dating SHOULD be an OPTION you can CHOOSE whenever (after 8 hearts)
- Inventory NEEDS to be expanded, alongside more easily accessible larger chests.
- EVERYTHING should be UPGRADEABLE rather than replaced because it reduces the feeling of accomplishment and reduces engagement with gameplay mechanics.
- More content would be nice, but its lack is understandable as a v1 release

As of right now, I cannot recommend this game for anything beyond year 1. The tedium builds up slowly and frustratingly and after year 1 you will have essentially seen most of the fun dialogue currently in the game.

Bought it a while back IN EA, I planned on playing it again but now the game doesn't even start through steam, and I'm seeing others with the same issue. I've tried workarounds but at this point I'm just going to play something else. I'll change to a recommend if it gets fixed.

I really hate to have to do this but optimization is one of the most important things and this game has 0.

A new, high-end PC should not have trouble running this, yet here I am writing a negative review for a game I was enjoying until it just decided to ♥♥♥♥ the bed on itself.

It is unplayable in its current state unless you are extremely lucky. I have tried every setting tweak in game, out of game, in every menu imaginable. I have tried tuning the pc itself.
Nothing.
Once the slow downs start hitting the game, they hit like a truck and even closing out entirely and rebooting do nothing to fix the issues. Not only does the game start lagging and stuttering but the audio does too! It is an absolute sensory nightmare.

Please, PLEASE, Devs, fix this. It seems like you had a stable product at one point and it is a shame I didn't get to experience it .

If it's ever addressed/fixed I would love to come back and amend this review and experience more of what this game has to offer.

Until then, I cannot recommend this game.