I heard about a cozy farming/dating sim called Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock) and saw it had a demo on Steam. I decided to give it a go since I gave up on Tiny Bookshop (neoludic games) (long story, will do an official review at some point). I liked the demo well enough though I did have some reservations about it. But, there’s a black cat you can pet; Erika Ishii is a dateable character in it; and I was intrigued by the premise so I bought it. The time I spent in the demo transferred to the game itself, which was nice. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t mind either way because I don’t expect it from an indie demo. AAA game? Yeah, I expect it, but I still won’t be anything more than miffed if it’s not there.
There will be light spoilers in this post, but nothing too big. The basic premise is that you’re a city woman called Tara who goes to a small town to help her grandmother with her (grandmother’s) farm.
I will say it’s it’s strange to play a game that doesn’t have a customizable character or an invisible protagonist (meaning you can’t customize them, but they’re not visible, either). I don’t usually play games that don’t allow me to customize my character. Wait. That’s not true, at least not for the last several games. Still. It felt weird in this game.
Also, I wish I had retained that this started out as a mobile game (which I had seen from looking up the game, but had immediately forgotten) because it does feel like one to a certain extent. Not in terms of content, but in terms of gameplay, how much grinding you have to do, and the whiff of microtransactions No, there are no microtransactions in the game, but there are the ‘this crop will take four in-game days to grow’ issues, which are very annoying.
So here’s the premise. Tara is a young city woman who is laid off and broke up with/was dumped by? her fiance at roughly the same time. She flees to her grandmother, Hazel’s, farm, ostensibly to help her ailing grandmother, but also to lick the wounds of her broken heart. The farm is in disrepair, and it’s up to Tara to fix everything.
In the demo, I spent a lot of time just going around meeting people. Weirdly, the mayor gives me an order that I have to meet every resident of the town (for which I got an achievement), and the game makes a big deal of it. It has Tara asking several people if they had to do it, if they thought it was really weird, and just in general highlighting it beyond what I thought was reasonable. It was an odd tone at the beginning of the game.
I liked meeting the people, though. There’s a diverse cast of townfolk, and I enjoyed meeting most of them. I do not love the art style, honestly, but it’s cute enough, I guess. Cute is not my thing, but it fits the game. And it’s well done because the characters are based on the actors; it’s just not my thing.
The first few days are gentle. Grandma tells me how to make a very simple dish, which is important because my stamina is shit. And I mean SHIT.
Side note: I watched a video from a guy who plays some cozy games, and he made the comment that ‘cozy games’ was a misnomer for the genre because there were so many things you had to do with rigid timeframes and stamina issues.
He’s not wrong. Not all cozy games , but many of them are so stressful. In fact, that was one reason I quit–but let’s not talk about that now. I hate stamina bars in games like this. I didn’t realize how tiny it was in this game in the demo because there wasn’t much I could physically do. I mostly just chatted up all the townfolk and pet the black cat. Yes, you can pet the cat; I do it multiple times a day.
Now that I’m in the game proper, I hate how limited my actions are. I wouldn’t mind so much except everything I need to cook/build/do takes so much energy. I can chop up ten ppieces of wood and run out of stamina. That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. And then, like I mentioned above, the crops take forever to grow.
This is why it feels like a mobile game–draaaaaaaaaaagging out the grind for no reason. And the resources take a long time to grow back.
Part of the reason I play these games is to relax; I don’t find this game relaxing. I find myself impatient as I expend all my energy before noon! Yes, I can make food/drinks to restore my energy, but the amount they give back (except the drink that takes a very sparsely-populating flower) is tiny.
In general, I find the proportions to be off. The game is very stingy on giving Tara energy while making things take so much energy. I read that you get more energy/stamina later, but I didn’t see when. Honestly, I really don’t want to play even a few hours more at this rate because I either have to waste so much time making food/tea so I can do things after noon, or I just don’t do anything but talk to people for the big proportion of my day.
Here’s a weird thing in the game. You can talk to each townfolk once a day. That’s not the weird part. This is: if you can’t talk to them, they just stand there, rooted to the spot. They don’t move at all, and you can walk right through them. It’s a very strange choice, and it makes them feel less real, obviously.
Also, I really dig most of the townfolk, but I wish they looked a bit more distinct. I get some of them confused, especially the children. I also can’t tell how old the kids are, so it’s hard to tell if what they are saying makes sense for a child their age or not. Like the game talks about one of the girls, Juliet, babysitting the twins. Yet, Juliet looks to be roughly the same age as the twins. It’s not that she looks that young, but that they look older than (I’m presuming) eight or nine.
The personalities are very different, though, so that helps. One of the citizens was doing Taiji in the park, and I had to laugh because, well, she was doing it wrong. She was moving her hands left to right and very slowly. It was not a discernable Taiji movement or any other martial art that I know.
So, another interesting thing to this game is that Hazel is a witch. This is also in the demo so it’s not really a spoiler. Tara is to become an initiate, too, which, means more crafting. I didn’t realize how big into crafting this game was. I did not craft hardly at all in Elden Ring (FromSoft), and that crafting menu is massive. Now, I’m crafting every two minutes, it seems.
I’m done for this post, but I’ll probably talk more about it tomorrow. I need to muse more about how what I wanted this game to be and what it actually turned out to be just didn’t quite match up.