Alright, folks, here comes the review that I didn't want to have to make, but I am indeed making this.

Until the devs get their house in order, I will continue to have this as a not recommended. I have waited since 2023 (!!!!!!) for this game to be released. The day it released, I bought it at midnight. Hell, I already have 50 hours into it. But there is some severe quality issues here that need to be addressed. As of right now, the game is unplayable for me because a bug is making my days not cycle. So until that is fixed, this is where the road ends for me.

1. THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN EARLY ACCESS RELEASE.
How can you, the development team, in good faith, release this game and claim it is ready to go? It is absolutely not. There are numerous bugs, the game design and UI does not feel completely flushed out, and there is a severe lack of information, making game progression incredibly confusing.

2. THINGS NEED MORE IN-DEPTH DESCRIPTIONS
How is anyone supposed to guess certain aspects of crops and items if you don't either 1) put it in the description or 2) make it a specific part of the story line with a quest. It is not intuitive, it is clunky and unforgiving.

3. QUALITY OF LIFE
There needs to be overhauls to certain things. When you pick up a building with a spell, and cannot place it, you lose the mana despite not completing the spell. When you use the axe spell, it will use an axe for the tree and then an axe for the stump. When you use your net and miss a soul blob, it uses energy. This is overly grindy. Also, storage is a huge issue; why would I walk inside to store things I am going to use outside? Connect it or create a better chest organization system.

There are good aspects of this game. Some of the dialogue is great, the character design (aside from the overly done alcoholic plot-line that feels very 'ha ha you're a dumb addict') and storyline has strong bones, and overall could have the makings of a great farming sim if the devs listen to what is being said. I think incorporating more characters and areas would be amazing (I heard they scraped Medusa which is such a disappointment) once the game is working more seamlessly.

A few other small potatoes I will also add in:
-There needs to be a different selection of hair that isn't on the NPC's as well as outfits and accessories. Same with home goods. It feels lazy.
-Make Pumpkin Head datable. (This is for purely selfish reasons)
-Add turning Viktor human again as a plot point, please.
-No more loading screens between areas. They make everything more tedious.
-Give the museum hallways and not....whatever that is.
-Festivals need more substance. They are boring and there is no incentive to doing them.
-Make 'Love|Like|Neutral|Hate' gift-giving more straight-forward.
-There are in-game typos.
-Consumables need better in-game population. Once you clear an area, they do not seem to regrow.
-Soul blob counter.
-In your information panel, add a museum guide.
-When you mine, everything should give rocks.
-Implement a general store. This could expand cooking, which also needs an overhaul. There is no incentive to cook.
-Mini-map.
-Game screen quest tracker.
-Add gift giving to ghosts and sneks since they have birthdays.
-Gates.
-Stop time in decorating mode.
-Put vampsters in inventory.
-Upgrade barn size availability.
-Background music.

Please listen to the fanbase: you have gold here, but you have to polish it properly to make it perfect. I really hope that you hear us and strive to improve these things because this could be the next big farming sim.

I just want to start by saying that I love this game. It feels so rare nowadays that you can spend years getting hyped over a game pre-release and then it lives up your expectations and even exceeds them. This game does so many things so well, and even though I do have several negatives listed below, the positives win hands down.

It's absolutely worth picking up if you love story, well developed characters, beautiful graphics, smooth gameplay, exploration, and decorating. The magical elements are really fun, and the theme is so well incorporated. Some games in the genre just feel like a typical farming game but with a new skin slapped on, but this game is living like a magical farm sim and isn't just dressed up like one, if that makes sense.

♦ STORY AND NPCS: This game is very story driven, especially in the beginning, far more than a lot of other farm sims. And the NPCs are some of the best I’ve encountered. They’re constantly getting into shenanigans and roping you in along the way. There’s so much drama and it’s so fun to see some chaos; a lot of farm games play it safe with their NPCs, but this game has family rivalries, drama within families, and occasional tension between supernatural groups. NPCs sometimes comment on events happening around town, and will notice when you change your outfit. The heart events I’ve encountered have been really cute and do a proper job of showing insight to the characters. I am not far enough along to comment on romance mechanics, but there is a really nice selection of candidates.
♦ THERE ARE TWO SETS OF PORTRAITS: This is such a unique option. If you go into settings, there is an option to use a different set of character portraits. Both are really well done.
♦ THE GRAPHICS AND OVERALL LOOK ARE AMAZING: This game is just so cute. I don't love that the characters have weird little toddler bodies, but their faces and expressions are adorable. The world looks amazing and the NPC houses and shops are decorated really well. It feels lively, with the NPCs all running around doing stuff. The times, animals, trees, buildings -- basically everything -- are all well designed.
♦ THE MAP IS BIG: There’s a central town area with shops, but also several other zones you can run around in. There’s a million flowers to forage in the spring and all the NPCs seem to like them as gifts (except Noel, the picky little ♥♥♥♥), although the flowers mostly vanish after spring and that's annoying. All the zones have a different aesthetic and variations in flowers, bugs, etc. There’s also different caves to mine in that offer different resources. Some of the areas are locked to start, but the map gives you clues of what you might get access to in the future.
♦ THERE ARE A LOT OF COLLECTABLES: Fish are kind of limited, but there are a lot of bugs to find, and there are also flying little skulls and fuzzy blobs called vampsters that you can discover in various places. The skulls are basically little spirits, and when you catch them, you get a little blurb about how the spirit died and they’re always very silly. There’s also a ton of blueprints and recipes to discover by digging.
♦ RANCHING: I’m really enjoying the ranching so far. There are four options for animals, and they’re wacky versions of animals you already know. The shop rotates every day with three different animals, so you can watch for different species and color variations to appear. Animals don’t require building a relationship, which I find very refreshing. You can also talk to them while you’re transformed into a cat.
♦ FARMING AND MAGICAL PLANTS: There’s a decent selection of crops, and many that are available year round. The magical plants are really fun too, because some of them require something extra from you, such as feeding them fish or bugs.
♦ YOU CAN PLAY A CARD GAME WITH THE NPCS: At one point, a character will introduce you to Nocturna, which is a very simple but very fun game, and you can collect cards around the world to build your deck. Most characters will let you challenge them to a game. You can also go into your settings to create new decks to play with.
♦ YOU CAN USE ANYTHING AS DECOR: Bugs, fish, clothing, flowers, food, etc. There’s so many extra types of things you can use for decorating in this game.
♦ THE MINI GAMES ARE SIMPLE AND SATISFYING: I’m not big on minigames, especially if they’re unnecessarily complicated. But the cooking and fishing minigames are nice and easy. There’s also a brief game for casting spells, and it’s quite satisfying to memorize the pattern to cast a spell and then be able to do it.
♦ THE GAME RUNS REALLY WELL AND FEELS GOOD TO PLAY: I can only think of one tiny tiny bug I’ve encountered. Otherwise it runs perfectly. It’s super smooth, the controls feel good, the menus and UI are great, and overall it just feels really good.
♦ THERE’S NO COMBAT: Look, I like combat quite a lot. But not every farming game needs it. It’s nice to see a game do something different.
♦ QUALITY OF LIFE - THE GOOD STUFF: There’s infinite storage in your house, and you can craft directly from there. You can also create storage boxes and crafting will NOT draw from there, so it’s nice if you have things you want to hoard/protect from crafting. The tool wheel feels really good. When you build from the carpenter, you just need to pay a fee, you don’t need to supply the materials. You can leave and come back to festivals, which I’ve never encountered in any other farm game.


♦ STAMINA: It’s pretty typical of farming sims to start you off with low stamina, but it can be particularly brutal in this game. I feel like I really can’t accomplish much before it runs out. And some activities seem to cost too much. Like I catch six or so bugs and I’m done for the day; it doesn’t help that bugs can be tricky to catch and a failed swing seems to still drain stamina. Some cooking recipes help regain it, but a lot of recipes offer really low stamina recovery for some reason. I think stamina could do with being a little more forgiving in the early game.
♦ FORCED CAMERA ZOOMING: When you swap tools, the screen zooms in on your character. It sounds like a small thing, but I cannot express how much it annoys me when games force your camera to do certain things. Just let me live my life. I don’t need to count my character’s freckles from two inches away while they’re swinging the axe.
♦ THE FARM IS SMALL: For a game full of decor options, there seems to be very little space allotted to the farm. Maybe it can be expanded later; not sure. But there is not a lot of space compared to some other games in the genre.
♦ CUT SCENES INTERRUPT YOU: I have had several occasions now where I’ve carted a vampster across the map, only to encounter a cut scene. After the cut scene ends, the vampster has returned to where it was, and I have to redo the whole walk.
♦ THE RELATIONSHIP MENU DOESN’T KEEP TRACK OF LIKES OR DISLIKES: When you gift a character, you can go into their profile to see a list of recently gifted items and their reactions. But this list is short, and once the items fall off, the menu does not remember for you what the NPC has liked or disliked. That’s usually a given in these types of games, so it’s weird that it’s left out here. I already hate having gifting in games, it’s one of my least favorite mechanics, and the lack of proper tracking makes it even more annoying in this game.
♦ QUALITY OF LIFE - THE BAD STUFF: There’s no mini map. There’re no quick buttons to move things to and from inventory and storage. Mana doesn’t fully refill each night. You have to buy a potion to change your physical appearance. You can’t see values of items in your inventory until you open the sales bin.

This is a "get it on sale" type of recommendation.

I didn't know much about this game aside from some trailers going into it, and its definitely a cool setting with the supernatural vibes.
A few things I really like:
-watering your crops does not consume stamina and you don't have to go tile by tile, I can water 50+ crops within a half-hour in game.
-2 artstyles of character portraits to choose from
-a global storage that the game can pull from for all recipes
-lots and lots of options for decor
-main quests unlock significant progress like useable food for our vampire, farming spells, new areas
-no skill system you need to grind
-fishing is super easy with no real minigame attached
-instead of a mount you turn yourself into various animals to travel faster
-you can also talk to the animals
-your roommate is a cat
-wide age range of the dateables
-each character gets a cutscene for every heart increase
-the characters have meaningful relationships with each other
-Tool wheel so they don't actually take up space in the inventory

Things I wish could be better:
-there are 5 different sets of collectables (insects, fish, souls, cards and vampsters) and only 2 of them actually reward you for getting them
-money goes from really slow to incredibly fast within 2 seasons
-stamina goes from scarce to barely an issue in the same time
-In dialogues, your character gets the illusion of choice by being offered 2 different lines saying the same thing
-there are no gates to the fences that I have found so my animals just roam across the fields
-if there is no main quest ongoing there is not much to do. On those days I run a loop of taking care of the farm, checking out the shops, and talking to the various NPCs. Even with that, I can end the night after abt 3/4ths of it is over. I don't actually know what happens when the sun comes up bc I have never had enough to do to find out
-the menuing can be tedious at times and there is no button to put an entire stack into storage
-My canonically grumpy player character does a very cutesy "item get" animation that does not fit the way I headcanon the personality and takes me out of immersion every time xD