Farming life can be difficult, and that’s a hard thing to remember when playing through most of the happy-go-lucky farming sim games out there where waking up early to harvest your crops and living out in the elements is as easy as breathing, and death is something that you don’t find yourself thinking about at all.

Echoes of the Plum Grove does something a little different, taking a leaf out of Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life’s book, and putting a focus on the passage of time and how that affects your characters. The main focus of Plum Grove is less farming and more lineage. There’s a great deal of importance placed on the act of starting a family and raising someone to eventually take over your farm when you die; because you will die, that’s just the way it works.

Honeywood is quite explicitly based on 1700 Massachusetts and the devs talk a lot about their research on the era via their social media. The inspiration is very clear in the architecture and outfits that you see the townspeople wearing day in and out, they also have cute little catchphrases to say such as ‘Fare thee well!’ or ‘Godspeed!’ whenever the player says goodbye to them. Being Australian, I don’t know all that much about this setting, but it evokes what I picture when I hear an American talking about Thanksgiving, which I assume was the intention.

Another element that ties Echoes of the Plum Grove to it’s setting is that it doesn’t shy away from the concept of death at all, it’s ever-present throughout the game. There isn’t necessarily a great deal of doom and gloom around the subject and the world is very bright and colourful, it’s just a fact of life, people get sick, people get old, and people die. Given the gameplay, this was the best route for the narrative to take, getting too deep into darker territory just for the sake of surprising players often comes off as trite and unnecessary, so it’s good that Plum Grove manages to toe that line.

It’s a bit of a half-measure. The game doesn’t lean into the survival mechanics quite enough for it to really be a survival game. I didn’t have any trouble staying fed and always managed to get more than 8 hours of sleep every night, so the mechanics don’t add all that much to the gameplay loop as a whole and instead just serve as a minor annoyance while you are busy getting your crops planted for the season. Luckily the farming itself is done quite well, the art style makes all the different fruits and veggies you can plant really pop and there’s a lot of satisfaction in seeing a full field of crops on your farm. There isn’t much innovation about it, but there doesn’t need to be, it all just works. Some newer mechanics include a compost bin that you can dump your spoiled food in to make fertiliser and drying racks used to preserve meat or fruits to prevent them from spoiling, both of which tie in very nicely with the process of expiring food and feel very organic in the game.