The initial main goal you are given is to find a way to stop the whirlpools off the coast of Azoria, preventing anyone else from having an accident like your own, and allowing trade to once again enter and exit the small colony. All while working on your own little slice of paradise in your downtime.

The fae part of Fae Farm doesn’t make much of an appearance until you reach chapter five of the game after you have already solved the issue with the whirlpools and can move on to much grander things. This comes a little too late, in my opinion, as by the time I finally started learning more about the magical side of Azoria, I was already getting burnt out and feeling like my progression was getting nowhere. Once I finally hit that fifth chapter, my interest did come back very quickly, but just know that it can feel like a bit of a slog getting there.

It also negates the need to switch between different tools while farming; the game will automatically switch to the axe if you lock onto a tree, or the pickaxe for a rock, and so on. It’s a small change, but certainly a very welcome one. I was also a big fan of the addition of a jump button. It’s never super necessary, but I love hopping around so it was a big plus for me. There is also an unlockable high jump that you gain partway through the main story which is a lot of fun to use, because the second hop is more of a twirl than a jump and it feels great to control.

Another thing that some people will be glad to hear is that the game does not punish you for staying out too late, or require you to return to bed at the end of each day. You certainly can do this, and going to sleep earlier nets you a bonus in the morning, but if you are still outside by 12:00, the game just ends the day and starts the next with you back in your cabin. I personally found this a little hand-holdy, though I am a sicko who loves working around time constraints, so take this criticism with a grain of salt. You might actually find it improves your experience depending on how easy-breezy you like your farming sims.

You can craft, and then dye pretty much all furniture, and there are also floor decorations that work a bit like Animal Crossing paths, but with far more variety and use cases. If you are interested in making both your home and your farm a visual feast, Fae Farm definitely gives you that option. It’s also smart enough to allow crafting from whatever you have in your storage shed, instead of you needing to have the correct materials in your inventory, which is a welcome change.

As mentioned, as in most modern farming sims, Fae Farm has a big emphasis on dungeon delving. There is one dungeon that you can unlock within the first few days of starting the game; it’s only 25 floors deep, but what makes it interesting is how you unlock the ability to teleport to floors you have already visited. Each floor has a space for a seal to be inserted into a pedestal, which will then make that floor accessible by teleportation, but the catch is that you need to craft the seals yourself, often with materials that you won’t find until you are a little deeper in the dungeon. The other big thing is that you have to place the seals in order; you can’t set one up on level 11 until levels 1 – 10 already have one, and as you go deeper, the seals will require more advanced materials and become more difficult to craft.

I also love that when teleporting to a floor, you are able to view a list of what resources you can find on that level and how likely you are to encounter them. It saves a lot of time if all you need is some copper and you just want to jump straight to the floor that you know will have the most of it.

The only other major thing to spend your time on in Fae Farm is side quests and character relationships. There are many characters that you can bump into in Azoria, and pretty much all of them are likely to hand you a side quest at least once. Unfortunately, this area of the game is where I think it falls the most flat.

Every character in the game is incredibly generic, spouting recycled lines of dialog every time you speak to them. Many of the characters share dialog too, so on some days, five of them might tell you that spring is a great time to find mussels on the beach. I didn’t see much variety with the romance options either. The game alarmingly told me that I had been flirting with one of the characters for three days when he was still just talking about how much he misses snow, but hey, spring is nice too! This is a line of dialogue that I heard from at least three other NPCs, but I wasn’t flirting with any of them apparently.

I think it’s a big step forward for 3D farming sim experiences in this area alone, much of the recent fare from Story of Seasons or Rune Factory has done little to impress me visually but Fae Farm has style in spades. The character models are the only part where my feelings are mixed, I get extreme MySims vibes from them and I do think this is largely due to the characterisation (or lack thereof) issues that I mentioned earlier and not necessarily a fault of the art style. Were the characters a bit better developed I’m sure it wouldn’t bother me, but with how it is now, it’s big MySims vibes.

Fae Farm’s environmental design has no such issues. The world uses a lot of rounded shapes and designs that are incredibly appealing and a delight to explore. It becomes even more enticing once you reach the fifth act and are finally able to venture into the Fae realm where the world is covered in unfamiliar flora and fauna and shaded in the gorgeous deep pastels. It might be a deep cut, but it scratched the same itch as Kingdom of Amalur’s environment design, and that says a lot.

Unfortunately, the music isn’t really anything to write home about. It’s all perfectly serviceable, but I wouldn’t call any of the songs earworms and the second I stop playing I can’t remember them at all. I wish there was a bit more identity to the soundtrack, as it does come across as pretty generic, especially when compared to the game’s general aesthetic.