Hello farmers, and welcome to another episode of the harvest season. My name is Al.
And we are here today to talk about cottagecore games.
Hello, Azeland. It’s been a while. How are you?
I am happy to be sitting.
I’ve been running around like a lot as of recently.
So I’m very happy to be sitting.
Cool. I am also good. I don’t tend to run around, but I do tend to be busy. My kids are now in bed, so this is the best time of the day.
Wonderful, perfect. This is peak sitting right now.
Yes, I’ve you I haven’t finished listening to your latest podcast episode and I remember at the beginning you mentioned you can have alluded to K-pop demon hunters. I presume you don’t talk about that later on in the episode.
No, I know, I do not. I do not.
No, but you have presumably seen the film. Yes, so the I’m thinking of when they’re walking back to their their lounge after their show at the beginning and just chanting couch. That is that is how I feel many evenings.
I have. I have watched it once, and I did enjoy it.
that is what I crave desperately right now in life. I crave couch and then just the immediate
just cut to and we’re debuting a new single is just how I feel.
Yeah. Yes. There is no rest. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
Illusion is the illusion of the couch.
Yeah. So we are not here to talk about K-pop demon hunters. Although maybe, but who knows?
if it comes up you know who knows oh my gosh yeah you’ve definitely seen it
We’ll see. I’ve seen it more than you though. Apparently, I’ve seen it three times now.
One of my top films of the year.
Like imagine, I often think about how I think teenage me would hate adult me.
You go back and tell like 15 year old me that one year his, I mean, first of all,
But guess that like, you know, well, yeah, it wasn’t really, I think I was aware of it.
You know, when I was 15, was that 20 years ago?
But if you, if you went back 20 years ago and told me that in 20 years,
your favorite, one of your favorite films of the year will be a, uh, uh, but a K-pop band.
That’s just how it would be with K-pop, you know?
Uh, he would be very confused and very disappointed in what I became.
But, uh, yeah, well, yeah, yeah, uh, where was I?
Yes, we’re- we are instead here to talk about Coach Gorgames.
The main topic this episode is Firefly Village, which we will get onto.
Before that, we have a bunch of news.
But first of all, Aislyn, what have you been up to?
I have been up to a lot of working, that’s nothing new.
I just finished the post game or specifically the looker stuff and Pokemon X, and that
is better than the entirety of Pokemon X.
In my opinion, I loved, I loved the looker storyline and everything.
I’ve been still working through Persona 3 reload, and I’ve been watching one of my friends while I wander stop for the first time.
So in a way, I’m kind of replying the game.
So that’s been really, really nice because I gifted her.
I was like, it was on her wishlist for a while and I was like, “You need to play this game.”
And we were in a call and I was like, “You know what? You need to play this game.
I’m going to give you the game.”
And then during one of our gaming sessions, you’re going to play the game and I’m going to watch.
And that’s what we’re doing now.
Yeah, the, one to stop is definitely on my list of games I’m going to play before the end of the year,
Because I just love the game.
especially when I find out how short it is. I’m like, oh yes, I definitely like, when I see a game that is,
people really like and is a game that I think I’ll like, and you can complete it in 10 hours,
that sounds perfect to me. So, you know, that’s like, that’s like a week of playing a game for me,
like, some other games we might be talking about later this episode.
Um, the other, my other question for you is persona. Is this your first persona game?
Of you played others, right? Okay. Would I like a persona game?
I know they’re not short, right? So I know that I know that
about them, it’s not like I only play short games. I do play longer games. I have
put, you know, Pokemon Viola, I currently have like 350 hours in, right? So I, you know,
and I put like 150 hours into tears of the kingdom in the first month, right? So like I am open
to games where I put in, you know, over 100 hours. I am aware that that is a thing that
would probably have to happen if I was to get the full experience of this game. But is I don’t
know, if persona games are the sort of games I would like or not. Ooh, my favorite parts
What is this going to be a very odd question, but what are your favorite parts of Pokemon like Pokemon games?
of Pokemon games would be the collecting of the Pokemon. Yeah.
Okay, because I’m like, if it’s the, if you don’t mind or you enjoy like the grinding to an
extent, I think you would enjoy persona. If you don’t like a grindy experience, I might be just a
little bit hesitant, but the dialogue and the story. And again, to be fair, this is A, I have a
It’s my first persona game, so I don’t know if this carries over the English.
Carries over to other persona games, but it’s very dialogue/story heavy.
And you do just kind of like a lot of repetitive tasks in a way to get more dialogue
So I guess one thing to talk about is do I like grinding? Do I like doing repetitive tasks
and get to know the characters, and then you grind up and level up your characters
is to do like boss battles and stuff.
four hours to get to an end.
Well, what games do we talk about on this podcast?
I was going to say, with that said, with all of the farming games that are very repetitive…
Yeah. Yeah, I don’t I feel like grinding is not and I’m not the biggest fan of grinding in
Pokemon games, but I think it’s because of the type of game it is. I prefer to do the collecting
and get through the story.
And then, well, as Kevin said, I do shiny hunt.
So let’s not pretend like I don’t do grinding.
But I think if I expect that going into a game that
is a different thing, right, I wouldn’t want grinding
in a Mario Kart game, for example.
Because I’d be like, this is not–
Yeah. Well, obviously, you don’t want to grind the rails in the new Mario Kart.
I’m not here for grinding.
Well, I don’t think you grind on rails, hey, hey.
But I don’t want to have to play the same course 100 times
that’s– I’m here to play the courses until I’ve gotten first
in all of them, and then I move on to the next.
But do I have in other games and enjoy those games?
I think until maybe a month ago, I would have
said, I’m not a big fan of dialogue heavy games.
However, story season’s grand bazaar changed me on that.
in the, um, I presume you’ve not heard the episode on Gram.
One of the things I really like about how they did dialogue in that game is, uh, one,
No, I have not been able to listen to it yet.
it has, uh, not full voice acting, but all the dialogue that matters, like all the story-based
stuff has, has full voice acting. Um, but also the conversations you can set to auto advance.
So what I was doing, because part of my problem is I, I will sit with a game and I’ll be like,
you know, I’ll just, I’ll, I’ll be playing and it’ll come to,
a dialogue bit and I’ll just like mash through the dialogue. And it’s not, I don’t want to hear the dialogue. It’s that when I’m not a big reading fan, right? Like I just not super fun. I don’t enjoy looking at text. I’m reading it. Ironic that I am a software developer and that entire job is text based, but I don’t enjoy.
You could burn down you know you don’t want to keep reading during your off time
Maybe that’s, maybe that’s the reason. Maybe it’s, you know, and it’s why I’m not a huge book reader. I just don’t like looking at text and trying to figure out what it is.
So that I think as part of it, but also like my hands sometimes just need something to do and I struggle to hold a console or a controller and not press buttons on it, right? And you’re sitting there for ages, reading text, not pressing buttons. That’s not how, that’s not how games work. Games work when you press buttons. So why did with story season’s grounds bizarre is that when the dialogue came on, I pressed the also thing turned up the volume and put the switch down and took my hands away and played with a fiddle toy or something.
Um, which is what I’m doing just now, I’m playing with a fiddle toy. So I don’t do other things. Um, and that I actually enjoyed the story and the dialogue from the characters much more being able to sit there fiddle and hear the story rather than having to read and wait and press about it at the right time. The other thing is like obviously quite often, uh, text will be really slow and you have to press to speed it up, but the problem is if you press too quickly, you then advance to the next.
Part of the text and you’ve missed the previous text. Um, and that’s a big problem I have in Pokemon games all the time, right? It’s like trying to advance the text, but not skip the text. Um, so being able to do that and like actually just slowing down that part of the game and forcing me to have my hands not on the switch meant that I enjoyed that a lot more. So I know persona three is not I suspect persona three being how old it is. We’ll not have fill vice acting. Um,
No, it does, for the most part, it does.
Oh, he does. Oh, really interesting. Oh, okay. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
It has a lot of voice acting.
It has a couple cut scenes.
There is, it’s definitely still text dialogue,
relatively heavy, but there is a good amount of voice acting.
So I think it’s something to consider.
I think it’s worth giving a shot.
I have been really enjoying it,
but I also like reading, but there is still voice acting,
but I also have it, I’m playing it in Japanese voice acting,
just prefer to play a game from like in the native region
Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair. I’m a big, I’m a big, uh, a dub guy, uh, not because not because I,
where the game came from in their language.
So I’m just reading it all.
like I totally, because I’m one of these people that people hate who I watch the dub of squid game.
Um, and, uh, I know that people really hate that. And yes, when you have a dub quite often,
especially when it’s a Japanese to English dub, quite often the, uh, speech can be a bit weird
not been like translated into a natural way of speaking. And so some of it can be a bit jilted
and I get that. I, I just, and it’s not that I don’t like, it’s not that I hate reading subtitles
because I watch everything with subtitles, um, because I find it helpful to like back up where I
was here and go, yes, that’s what I heard. That’s fine. Let’s continue. It’s that I, I don’t like
how I can’t look away from the screen at any time or you miss stuff. When you are listening,
to something in English and you’ve got subtitles, it’s like you’ve got two ways of getting the
information in, um, which as people will tell you all the time is the best way to take information in
is with multiple ways, right? Listening and reading at the same time is a, is a, you take in much more
that way. Um, but also it means that like if I’m playing game or I’m doing, I can like look somewhere
else and I don’t miss a sentence, right? Whereas if you’re, if you’re listening in a, in Japanese or
or whatever, you just can’t.
Because I watch Pokemon in Japanese, but that’s because I’m too lazy to wait for the dub to come out, because it’s so late, and so I watch fan translations of the the Pokemon anime, but like that’s one 20 minute episode a week, right?
It’s a whole different thing.
Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s, yeah.
And also it’s Pokemon, it doesn’t really, the story doesn’t hugely matter if you miss a sentence, you still get the idea of it, whereas with squid game in particular, if you miss one sentence, you could miss a huge twist.
Right, like there was a lot of things happening. So that’s why I generally watch dubs, even though some of the voice acting is not the best.
Yeah, I will say I am a dub hater for myself and only myself.
I, anyone else that listens or watches anything with that’s like dubbed.
It’s fine. It’s not affecting me. It’s just a personal preference. I’m just like, no.
I’m like, you know, I’m a subtitle elitist for myself and only myself.
Because again, I’m like, it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. And I agree with you that being able
I was able to listen to it in English.
And also have subtitles does allow you to take in the information better, so if I did the same thing, I probably would take in the information better.
But I just, I just definitely have this preference towards, again, just listening to something in the language that it was made in.
Whether it be a movie, a show, a game, whatever it may be, but with that said, I will say I have heard very, very, very good things about specifically the personas areas and their English translations,
in acting, I’ve heard it’s really, really, really good.
It definitely depends on whether it’s done right or not because I’ve only seen one of the studio Ghibli films
It was the newest one the boy in the head and but it was it had excellent voice acting in English
And and I’ve heard that generally their films are very good with the dubs
Yeah, they have they get like some big time like American or not always American, but like big time like actress
Well, yeah, they had they had Robert Robert Patterson was in the in the boy in the head and like yeah, they do but yeah
Depends on how much effort they’ve put in and it’s just sometimes a lot of them
Especially Netflix ones do tend to be like it was somebody in a box reading
Like an automatic translation of what was said and they like have weird
Intonation of words and you’re just like that’s not how people talk. Why are you saying it like that?
So yeah, it definitely massively depends so I can see how
I think if it’s I can see how games would be better than film and TV because I think you
I feel like you have the budget for it, first of all.
That is a that is part especially the big ones, right?
But I think you know like for example the
You know the Zelda ones to use the kingdom and breath of the world had pretty good voice acting
Yeah, I know some people found Zelda annoying
that’s not an issue with voice acting. That’s just it was an a posh English accent. That was the issue, you know, no matter who is you’re going to be annoyed by a posh English accent, same.
I think that people if you’re putting in the effort to be voice acting in a game, you care about the voice acting. If you’re not putting if you don’t care about voice acting, you’re probably not putting it in the game at all.
Whereas you can’t do a film without words. Well, I mean, you can, but people don’t want that now, right? So it’s easier to not care as much about the effort of a dub when you’re making a film because you care about the original or whatever, and not necessarily. And it’s different people doing the translation and the dubbing. It’s not the original creators.
Well, I was gonna say you can, but…
So the effort isn’t necessarily there.
I will say I’m not I’m not confident in this, but I do wonder to bring it back to K-pop demon Hunter.
I will say I do wonder how these dubs for the other languages are if they also sound like it’s in a box. So that’s all my list of things to look up later.
With that so yeah, because it was Sony but Sony are
They’re a South Korean company aren’t they Sony
That is a great question. I have no idea
No, Sony and American apparently I thought Sony were South Korean that American interesting, okay, my bad
If you want to know it’s it’s Japanese
Wait, really oh, yeah, yeah, I’m mistreating this thing Sony
My reliable source Wikipedia tells me
And sorry, interactive entries.
Entertainment LLC is an American video game in digital age and to date company, all of Japanese
conglomerate Sony Group Corporation.
There was this, but what is there, where did their animation happen, Sony animation?
I think it was because it was Korean Americans that made K-pop demon hunters, I want to say.
So it’s an American branch of Sony, worked on by Koreans and Korean Americans question mark.
So Sony Sony Sony so any Sony pictures animation is American American some situation owned by Sony based in Los Angeles
This is all big question marks.
I guess not that surprising
But yeah, no, I’m I’m aware that the
Singers and music was written by Korean Americans. Yeah, but I guess
It’s not as simple as going. It’s an American thing
What is it sound like in other language?
which is because it’s it’s both and but also I was making that assumption based on Sony being South Korean not being Japanese, which is very different
I’m glad we, I’m glad we figured that out.
Yeah, okay. I don’t know what we figured out. We figured something out
We, we figured Ellie’s so funny’s not South Korean.
And we figured it out that I’m going to try and bring things back to K-pop demon hunters for, for funsies.
Nothing wrong with that is a great film and great music, and I’ve got I’ve got Craig my son. He’s obsessed with it now. So
What’s, what’s the all’s favorite song?
Oh, I think my favorite is what it sounds like
hmm that one’s that what that one’s my number two oh my god I were just
reverse really just the first gold is my number one and this is what it sounds
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I asked Craig what his favorite is and he just says all of them.
like right is my number two good picks good pick good taste you should listen
more kpop all of them easy
I’ve been listening to some I’ve been listening to some K-pop recently. I was listening to I’ve been really enjoying jump
by black pink. Yeah, I’m enjoying that song.
from Blackpink. I want to get into that song, but I just can’t. I can only get, I can only get
Mmm, it does need a good base.
into it if it was like, I’m seeing it live. Otherwise, like, I’m sitting in my, in with my earbuds on,
just listening to that. I’m just like, I just can’t, I can’t do it. It does. Yeah. Maybe like in my car,
maybe that’s where I can get into it more. Totally safe.
Just driving driving down the road very fast with your windows open.
We’re driving within the speed limit paying attention obviously.
Oh, and then the speed limit fast. That has to within the speed limit.
Fast within this speed limit. You can be you can be fast while also driving legally. Thank you.
True, you could be slow while also driving legally. So you, you make a good point.
Okay, so that’s what you’ve been up to. I have been playing firefighter village, which we’ll talk about later in the
episode and I also got Craig my youngest into playing Donkey Kong, but answer and he is enjoying that. So that’s fun.
It takes he doesn’t play a lot of games because he gets like really obsessed with games.
He’s basically been playing astro bot for the last year. He is he’s a hundred. He’s done everything
in the game. There were a couple of bosses that he needed to my help with, but other than that,
he did basically everything. And yeah, there’s there’s one level in the newest batch of update levels
Like even like the challenge levels?
Oh my gosh, I’m impressed.
hasn’t done yet. The mega mixed mastery. That that is the one he hasn’t done, but he’s gotten very close. He’s in the,
he’s managed to get to the last section of it. And I think it’s only a wee bit before he manages to finish,
he’s he’s freely good, which is terrifying. Yeah.
It’s crazy yeah, he’s like significantly better than me and maybe even better than my husband. I don’t know
I think these things are very much about how early you start doing these things right because I’ve seen a lot of people who grew up with 3D platformers, not understand and know how to use 2D platformers, which is very interesting.
is interesting, it makes sense though, because I do struggle with 3D platformers because
of just like the depth of fields, but 2D platforms is generally easier for me, but I also
grew up probably with more 2D platformers versus 3D.
When I was I grew up playing basically both at the same time because I grew up playing Sonic
And then straight into Crash Bandicoot
Ah, ah, so you have the balance.
If any game is is gonna mess with your field of vision it’s Crash Bandicoot
I only have like the Vegas memory.
I played a lot of like the demo, like the CD demo that you got in like the monthly magazines
or something from PlayStation of Spyro.
Interesting. Yeah, I never actually I never played Spyro crash was my was my 3d platformer
What’s, what’s, we, we, we, I don’t know, what’s the listeners 3D platformer.
What was your first 3d platformer
Well, who’s your first 3D platformer?
All right, let’s talk about some news
We don’t have a humongous amount in use because
three days after the last episode was recorded but
Pocket pair came in at the end with some big news
So we’ll get to that in a minute, but let’s go through the other news first
First up. We have a get you on the grasslands
Have announced an update for their game. They say
Couldn’t miss me. Am I really gonna try this in honor of
month. I am so sorry, Kevin and anyone
else is embarrassed by that pronunciation. In order of
Faroopila month, Gauture in the Grassland is receiving a special update that
introduces new mechanics, exclusive skins, customization items, and
adjustments that further enrich the player experience. So this is introducing a
new minigame, the magic of the Geitah, Geitah. It’s an instrument. It looks kind of
kind of like an accordion type thing.
And instrument the players can now play in the game beyond music. It also introduces a brand new teleportation mechanic to travel across different regions of the map as very, very different having to play our musical mini game to teleport to fast travel.
That is interesting. I like that though. That’s cute. I like that a lot. Just any music incorporated into a game is is always a plus one for me
They’ve also added new traditional skins, new stylized assets.
I buy southern soccer teams, a new NPC in some quality of life.
It looked like a pretty good update, and the game just came out pretty recently, right?
It’s pretty quick, which feels like the trend for a lot of these new, like a lot of the
I’m like, this game just came out, and there’s already an update.
Yeah, yeah, and it’s not, and it’s not early access, is it? It’s just, yeah, it’s just a game.
I think it’s just the game.
Yeah, it’s just the game.
What is this episode generally coming out also?
The episode will be coming out on the first of October, a week tomorrow.
I was like, it’s on sale now.
It’s not going to be on sale by the time this episode comes out.
No, no, it’s not, it’s not going to be on sale by the time I normally record and never mind the release of the episode coming out.
Next, we have a written factory Guardians of Azuma and Story of Seasons grand bazaar crossover, both games made by marvelous. So Guardians of Azuma will come out.
We’ll have a free DLC entitled Story of Seasons grand bazaar. It’s coming soon and that’s all we know.
I was gonna say like what I mean, yeah, I see that the the blue sky post
It’s like yep, it’s coming soon and that that’s that’s that’s it
I was like is it gonna be like a DLC for both games like four
Guardians are of Azuma. There’s gonna be like a story of seasons grandpa’s arthing and then vice versa
I think it’s just a DLC for, in fact.
Fair enough is it just it’s probably just gonna be the careraker
Can you tell I’ve never played any of these games?
Maybe I don’t know I I I I mean characters grandpa’s our characters in room factory would be interesting because they’re quite different tonally, right?
they look completely different.
Guess it could be that it might I mean my assumption immediate was like items
You’re telling me these cute cows are not going to be in Guardians of Azuma?
Look, I mean if there’s anything that would improve room factory game. It’s a more whimsy
Yeah, it’s very like, it takes itself, it feels like it takes itself very seriously.
It’s gotten more it’s got yeah, it’s it’s gotten more like that over time because room factory originally was just
And I’m like, “Are we just farming?”
Harvestman, but also combat
But it’s gotten it’s gotten more gritty and more serious
I love that, love that comparison.
I like the, I, when I, because I, again, I’ve never played this game before.
I, seeing the fact that it’s like combat, but it’s also a farming game.
I was like, oh, this is interesting.
But it did feel like it was taking itself a little bit too seriously.
And I was like, we need a little bit of like, ha, ha funny, like cute whimsy,
Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, in four, the, when you were carrying like a stack of
And I’m like, I don’t know if I’m getting that.
That guy just said in the trailer, lovely weather we’re having.
turnips or wherever, you would literally see the stack above your head. So it did have some
silliness like that, but they’ve kind of, I don’t think they had that in five. I don’t remember
them having that in five. So they’re kind of like, yeah, they removed some of the whimsy and kind
So I think as they’re leveling up and go I a lot of that happened when they moved made the move to like 3d relevant 2d.
Mm-hmm. Maybe I’ll check on an older, older one.
I don’t like them but maybe you will.
It might be worth the shot.
Some people I mean lots of people do.
They keep making them for a reason.
Lots of people that you can go back and listen to our Run Factory 4S episode if you want.
You know what? I will. I will do that.
Next we have a discountee update. This is the deep pockets update.
It is coming soon. Although the beta for it is out now if you want to subscribe to the
beta channel on Steam. You can add a basement to your shop. They call it they say dig a basement.
You need more space and can’t expand outwards. What but straight down this update adds a new
a new quest line that sees you expanding this guarantee once again.
But as you’ve known out there and nothing in blum-kest, blum-kest, blum-kest comes easy and there might be some other people in town who take an unexpected interest in your new basement project.
I really hope this is like that tunnel girl on TikTok. Do you remember that?
Were you aware of that? Are you not aware of this? There was this, there was this, there was this woman on TikTok who was referred to as “Turno Girl” and she was building a tunnel under her house.
What what I’m not on tick-nock first of all tunnel girl on tick-tock
But she just lived in like a suburb, right? So she was like essentially digging like underneath her neighbor’s houses.
And she had no like permission to do this. She didn’t have like a parameter or anything. And it was just this wild like couple of weeks where she was digging this massive tunnel under her house before the local government sure died.
I’m I’m seeing I’m seeing it on on YouTube. I’m seeing it via Reddit because again, I don’t have tik-tok
Oh my god, this is this is new. This is new information to me. This is this is white. What why?
It looks like she did eventually manage to get approval for the tunnel and she got a proper
permit and is doing the tunnel the proper way. But yeah, she got a mandatory evacuate and no,
As long as it’s not under other people’s houses, sure!
that was a mandatory evaluation. I remember mess read that, I mean. But yeah, she got to, it was
December last year that she was told to stop constructing and they would evaluate it and then
She would get there. Permit. It’s just…
It’s mad that you just start doing that without checking if you should or not.
Like, and I’m not saying that people don’t, you know, it does look like she knew, or she learned enough to know what she was doing.
She was crushing it, she was doing great for what I saw.
Apparently so, and apparently it was fine. It’s just like, we have a, you know, system to make sure that people know where they’re doing, and she wasn’t following that, so yeah.
Man imagine I’m just reflecting back on like when I lived with my parents in the town that would grew up in it
Was like an incorporated village type of thing and they’d like told you like you have to like you have to like mow your grass
In order to keep up with like the the the the rules of the town
I guess or whatever, but one of my neighbors he installed like a curb in front of his house and he got in trouble for that
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like I’ve heard people complain about being told off for the
Just for installing a curb in front of his house. Imagine the trouble that you could get in trouble for.
grass being the wrong length and stuff like that. And she managed to go months of digging a tunnel
under her ass. Anyway, so I hope this storyline includes something about that. That would be really
they also got upgrades to your shop. Um,
their little up your shop. They’ve got new items to the reward shop. Um,
they’ve got, um, new, uh, decorations for the outside of your shop. Um,
and obviously quality of life and bug fixes discount. He’s definitely on my list of,
I want to play it at some point, uh, but I haven’t done yet.
let me know how it is when you do because I like watched I watched a streamer
play it for like a little bit and I just wasn’t sure if I liked it or not so to get like a full
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it has a thousand, a thousand mostly positive reviews.
in-depth analysis rather than like having to like watch the full game would be nice so
because it looks really cute it looks very very cute and I think yeah so it’s got to be decent
and I like the undertone that they have had with the game where it’s like
description of the game selling more frozen fries will surely heal this broken community dot
dot dot right so I like that like undertone of like there is more to this game than you
you perceive kind of like wanders stop it’s like wandershop you think it’s just a cozy
team making game and it’s like nope it’s way more than that buckle in
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The, um, how long to beat for discount he’s giving 16 and a half hours for the main story 20 hours for completionist. So that’s definitely, uh, that’s, that’s pretty good. Pretty good length.
That’s, uh, a week if I’m in the mood for it two weeks if I’m going casually.
Yeah, I would I would say something
Um, okay. Next, we got a couple of other pieces of news. First stop, um, concerned eight has said.
That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s all the news about that. Uh, we are definitely at the point of over analyzing concerned eight tweets.
yep yep why why I just I just want to know why I thought we were done after 1.6 and we were
No. No. What happened is, what happened is he had ideas. So, well, so you, you, you obviously
going to focus and lock in on haunted chocolate here what happened what I mean I know he said
in one of those interviews but uh give us haunted chocolates here
hadn’t had the news in the previous podcast, which is where we pointed out that he says that
he is not really doing the work on this, but he’s the ideas and helping move it forward rather
implementing it. His team is big enough now, and he trusts them enough that he can like get
them to do most of the work. And he’s doing basically all the chocolate, the chocolate to taunt
dear, uh, onto his chocolate here, uh, instead. So he says it shouldn’t delay haunted chocolate
here much. That’s what he’s saying. So it sounds like he’s got a much more sensible, uh,
Okay, okay. All right, I’ll take it. Yeah, I am very…
Stardew Valley balance, if you
Okay, all right, we’ll take that. We’ll take them. I definitely miss the news. I’m very back
I mean, we’re I mean, let’s not pretend like we’re
loyalty podcast. So this all, this all tracks, this all makes sense.
getting it before I try to be. I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, look, I
wouldn’t it’s it’s always it’s hard to
predict these things, but if you gave me an
over under 2030, I would struggle to decide which one I
I was going for at this point.
Yeah, you know, I might, I might agree. Maybe I’ll just lock in just 20-30s, call it a day.
I think I would do the under on 2030, but I wouldn’t do the under on 2028.
Maybe that’s the way to go. How much longer?
I think 2028/29 is probably what I would be expecting at this point, but I think three years
ago I probably said 2026, so who even knows who even knows when did this game get announced?
I don’t even know, it’s, I feel like I’ve just heard about it for forever.
on my bad nor it was 2020 began working on it October 2021 was when he announced it. So we are coming
Okay. Okay, all right. So maybe, you know, 2028 is sounding pretty good.
2020, I feel like eight years is sounding pretty…
But he’s got the game development cycle down, you know?
He knows how to expedite the process a little bit here
and there, but then also I’m sure he’s including
like a lot more depth to this game.
Not that started doesn’t already have that,
but hopefully those two like balance each other out.
So it’s like the eight year mark, 2028.
five years. Wait, when was it released? He started working on it in 2011 and it was released
in 2016, so that’s five years. But you’re probably right, it probably is like a lot of the things
that he would have added to stars you in updates are probably things you’ll want to include
similar sort of things in the base game for this one, right? Like he’s got a lot more of
ideas of how he wants games to feel as a whole. I get that.
Yeah, definitely. Like there obviously at the end of the day, there’s absolutely no
Russian when it comes, you know, is when it, whenever it comes. And I’m sure it’ll be great
no matter what, but I wonder, I wonder how like his skills of game development have allowed him
to like what, what, what’s the, what’s the words I’m looking for? He’s home the skills. I’m sure
a number of the skills with game development. I wonder how that affects his workflow speed.
versus implementing the new ideas that he has. I’m curious to see how that pans out in regards to
like a timeline, because yeah, four, four, point five or five years for a Stardew, we’re at this point
approaching where we are at about five years for want to chocolate here. So it could be maybe another
two years. Who knows? I know. But at least he’s not actively working on this one at least.
Who knows it doesn’t help that it doesn’t help that he keeps doing starchy valley stuff
So that hopefully that gives us some hope.
All right, the other piece of news we’ve got is faith arm
So this complicated history around faith arm is that the company that developed
Phoenix Labs. They are the people who made dauntless. So they made faith farm and they released it in 2023.
And then the company basically died. They said that in 2024, they laid off most of their company
and said that they were just going to be focusing on dauntless and faith farm, no other of their
games. They canceled multiple games, including one game that was apparently only weeks away from
from being released in early access.
What could I vaguely remember hearing about this?
And then, yeah, then in the beginning of this year, they laid off the rest of their development team and announced that they were going to shut down the online components of faith farm and presumably don’t look because that’s like a basically a fully online game, wasn’t it?
Yeah, the game servers were shut down to me this year.
So the online part of faith farm, which was not huge, I didn’t actually use the online component at all, but it was shut down a few weeks ago, I think.
The, we have found out that apparently faith farm has now been purchased by a company called Gambit digital, who are a collective of.
figure out what they were, too. I was like, I, they have two games to their name,
An experienced collective, an experienced collective of video game leaders proudly announced
faith farm and bloody hell hotel. And I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on.
their acquisition of the game, including the existing title and ongoing IP rights.
The exciting partnership ensures that players can continue enjoying the game’s enchanting
live services while opening new possibilities for the future of Azordia.
The collective composed of Gambit Digital, GameCloud Network, Pure Wonder Interactive,
Bring together expertise and resources to enhance the player experience and drive innovative development of the faith farm franchise is a franchise if you got one thing, I don’t know the group.
Yeah, that’s an interesting choice of word.
The group will work together to nurture long term growth with gambit digital serving as the publisher of record for faith farm moving forward, originally developed and published by Phoenix Labs and launched in September 2023 two years ago, that is.
Faye Farm quickly cultivated a thriving
community with more than 500,000 players across all platforms, the new ownership team is thrilled to collaborate closely with this passionate community, ensuring the enchanting online experience continues to flourish.
Players can look forward to an exciting future announcement to lad even more magic to their isodia and adventure.
Pascal Nataf, Nataf, Pascal Nataf, co-founder of Gambit Digital added Faye Farm has captured the hearts of players around the world and were honored to help.
Guide is next chapter, as a studio written in Canada would especially proud that this partnership will ensure Faye Farm remains a Canadian IP when the continues to celebrate this community while staying true to the spirit that made us audio so special in the first place.
I hope for those that love Faith Arm I hope this means I hope this allows for the game to kind of
have like a comeback and come back to have the servers supported.
Yeah, I’m really fascinated by this like why is it multiple companies that are buying it and also
I mean they did say they were a collective. So maybe that’s part of it. I don’t know how these
So it looks like so it looks like Gambit digital digital is a new company that was only founded at the beginning of this month
that makes sense, considering they only have two games.
So that, that makes sense.
Yeah, I can’t help with you just a little bit hesitant
because of never hearing a game, but digital
and them just being so new.
Yeah, and hey, we know all in a game.
And how did they get the finances to purchase the game?
Oh, that’s that’s always a question for these companies like how did you get finances it’s always
You know, I’m sure they also got financial help
from the game cloud network,
peer wonder interactive and fatty acid.
Whoever they are too, I don’t know.
I hope, I hope it’s good for those that love the game.
But I can’t help but be hesitant because there’s just not enough information out there as to what all of this means.
It’s all just like buzzwords.
Oh no. Fatty acid or a generative AI studio.
Oh, bye. What a, what a, that’s exactly what we want.
All right, I don’t have much faith.
Good thing my heart is not poured into Fay Farm.
I can’t see much about people.
All I got from GameCloud Network was that they are.
What seems to be like a mobile game?
Yeah, I mean, that makes sense for the name, right?
True, true, you actually, yeah, very true.
GameCloud Network has brought together global leaders in advertising, enterprise media, and gaming to create a revolutionary way to authentically engage modern consumers.
that that is all buzzwords to me. That is 1000% all buzzwords.
It’s all buzzwords to everyone.
Oh yeah I do see this generative studio. Oh my god. No that I am a generative AI hater.
And what does it mean? What does it mean to be a collective of companies?
Y’all rich and banded together.
because it’s not like a company being owned by multiple companies like how, you know, Game Freak is
and now Game Freak, the Pokemon companies are a Game Freak or one of the companies.
The Pokemon company is a company, the owns Pokemon, and then there are other companies
that own that company. But having multiple companies owning the rights to
It seems like they all specialize in different things, so like Gambit is the publisher, game cloud, maybe like bringing it to…
I- Bay Farm is not a mobile game, right?
I don’t think so. It’s on steam and it’s on a switch and I think it’s on
Okay, so if it’s assuming it’s not a mobile confirmed and not a mobile game
Then maybe game cloud is going to be bringing it to mobile
Whatever pure wonder interactive is I have not a single clue and then
What generative AI is going to be used with faith farm?
Future game development. I’m not sure. I think they’re just all using their different like specialties to come together for the game
May or may not make or break the game. I don’t know my hands are up in the arms at my
hands. My arms are up in the air right now because I’m just like I don’t know. I don’t
I don’t know what to say, I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.
know what to say either. Yay!
All right, let’s go on to our final piece of news, which is a brand new game has been
announced by Pocketpayer, that is the PowerWorld developer.
They have announced a new game called PowerWorld PAL Farm, that is the full title PowerWorld
By farming life with mysterious creatures known as pals, team up with them to grow your
farm at your own pace in this brand new creature collecting farming sim, freely playable
Um, if you play Power World.
So, oh by, so this is a funny like fool circle moment for today because I woke up this morning
and the first thing I saw on my phone was this, like half six in the morning as I’m like waking
up because my son has got me up and I’m like what is life and I’m looking and I’m like oh,
I’m not sure what to say.
I mean, obviously I’m going to play it, right?
Let’s not pretend anything.
You appear to the like various standard things in farming games like shopkeepers and
Blacksmiths and stuff exist in this game, but they are pals.
So the shopkeeper is Patalia, one of the pals, and then the blacksmith is Anubis.
And there’s a cro-crowd-crowdage-ro, who is the master of sunbathing, apparently.
I’m not sure why they show you him fishing, if he’s the master of sunbathing.
It beats me. I mean, you got a sunbathe to fish, right? I think I don’t. Sure.
Sure, sure, whatever, I’m not sure you understand fishing.
And you’re talking to these pals, which I don’t think pals talk in
power world, so that’s an interesting change.
And then one of the pals has a chainsaw, which is very on brand for
I do think that some of it looks very funny.
There’s a moment where this pal like starts up the chainsaw and
is going around cut down trees while you’re also cut down trees with an axe.
you’ve given the pal a chainsaw I don’t know but then the the the the tree falls down and squishes another pal which is a very funny moment and then you’re apparently playing Russian roulette with some creepy shadow did and then
for a little guy yeah that that makes no sense to me well
like I i think this is very much leaning on the same sort of humor and stuff that pal world had and it’s clearly trying to be
like right at the end of the video you have a pal come up to you and and a very animal crossing way is like talking to you says oh you’re the newbie you just moved in you seem pretty cool and then you’re player character.
Yeah, I know yeah the pal says i’m confident in my ability to reach people be my friend and then the player character gets a pal ball, I can’t remember what they call pal or whatever is and throws it at the confused pal and catches it.
So it’s clearly trying to be funny and satirical and well it’s working for me so far i’m I’m used I wasn’t expecting this.
I wasn’t expecting this either. Like, this, this genuine, when I saw this in the notes, I was like,
oh, oh, interesting. I mean, the game itself looks like really good. I’m just, I’m, I’m just
in the camp of just still being hesitant because of everything that happened in the past.
So I can’t help but just go in with a sense of just, you know what I mean?
But the game itself does look good.
Like, visually very good.
And the satirical humor, I think, is cute.
I just don’t understand this Russian roulette thing.
Like, what are we doing here?
How does that relate to anything else with farming?
Why are we Russian rouletteting in a farming game?
But I guess that is the humor of the game, right?
He looks like he could be from like Assassin’s Creed, but also not.
not. And I only say that because it was
I could see that. I could see that. I’m curious to see how this plays out. I will say that. I’m very
I don’t even feel like it feels like a dragon-coise character to me more like.
curious to see how this plays out. I’m intrigued. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, look, whoever happens is going to sell well, because power world did and people are fascinated by this company.
Interestingly, I don’t know. I don’t know if you are aware of this or not, but the
announced that, um, power is going to exit early access next year, which is his inference.
Um, they also announced that this game is being developed by a different team.
So if you were worried about that, which I’m sure some people would be
Hey, there’s that. At least it’s not a, it’s not another haunted chocolatier type of moment.
Well, is anything is anything on to joke with your woman. I really am fascinated and I I love to see
Rumor has it there. Oh, so right. Okay. Have read a paragraph here on the island. There is a marketplace run by residents and pals where you can buy and sell crops and crafted goods
Our we’re reading the same thing
Rare items can sometimes be found there. Rumor has it. There’s also a forbidden black market hidden away in the islands for our site
guns suspicious fertilizer
all sorts of things to trade. The consequences of buying these items are entirely
crazy. This is nuts. I’m intrigued. I’m intrigued. I’m definitely intrigued.
Look, I am, at least partially in, I’m definitely something of the monkey or the gun, yeah.
I like the little gif of above right above that marketplace thing of just this little guy,
just yep, this guy just pulling up with yep.
What looks like a shotgun, but apparently is automatic rifle.
I know, yeah! The logistics of it did not make sense.
I mean, if this game has some like real ethical questions that make you decide things and you can get benefits from that. But you also then have to deal with the consequences of it. I, I’m, yeah, let’s go for it. If there are consequences for me giving a pal of chainsaw.
Yeah, you know what, true. It doesn’t have to make sense.
I also find it interesting, this is a third person.
game because pow world is first person.
Oh yeah, that’s right. Maybe it’s because it’s being developed by someone else. It also, like, generally farming games are third person, so they probably did that for that reason.
Yeah. There are first person farming games, but yeah, I don’t like one.
I can’t even think of one off the top of my head.
All right. Well, there we go. That’s, that’s the thing.
Do you have anything to talk about with a poco pia before we go on to the main topic?
with Pocopia. Oh, man. Um, um, I’m, I’m, I’m losing all of my time to that. I know that for sure.
Let it know. I’m let, let’s let poco come on farming game.
As long as it’s good. I, I don’t, I just don’t know what the gameplay mechanic is going to be.
I hope it’s not just, well, you know, I’ll still take it, but I hope it’s not just
Hannibal Crossing, copy and paste the Pokemon, but I will, I will still happily take it, if that’s
the case. Um, I’m looking forward to it. I’m definitely looking forward to it, and I’m definitely
I’m actually going to be…
losing, I’m sure, a lot of time in the game, regardless of how good it is.
‘Cause it looks very cute. I just hope it doesn’t feel empty.
It’s my only concern, but…
Yeah, yeah, I’m very intrigued to see how it ends up. It looks very much like a dragon quest builders to to me
Which is a more involved than animal
Okay, so that’s good. I’ve never played Dragon Quest to be fair, so I’m not familiar, but if you say it seems like it’s going to be more involved, and that’s nice to hear, because again, yeah, I just don’t want it to be, I don’t want it to feel like empty and feel like so slow, like Animal Crossing does when you first start.
Oh, yeah, I mean, I think a huge part of that is is it just being like real-time based
That massively slows down
Yeah, I think so too. It would be kind of nice actually to have kind of the essence of animal crossing
in the sense of like real time-based, but still a way to be able to play as much as you want.
I don’t know what that would look like, but that would be nice, but I’m also not expecting
Yeah, I think the problem is it’s hard to do crops on that sort of thing and and not
Because if you it’s real time, right, it doesn’t make any sense for the crops to grow in a day
And so you’re massively reducing how much you can do in any
It just changes how you think about things and I certainly would not like that
I think it only works in an animal crossing because it’s such a small part.
Yeah, yeah, it’s a good point. Okay. Yeah, I don’t know yeah
I don’t know what that would look even if you use like fertilizer or something
I don’t even know if that would
Speed up anything because again, like you said the real-time aspect does kind of put a hindrance on that
You could give me anything and I would be happy just because it’s a cozy Pokemon game. I don’t care
I am I am weak. I am losing again all of my time to it. I I am I’m happy
I’m looking forward to it a lot
Yep. All right, let’s go on to the main topic of the podcast and that is Firefly Village.
So I started this game playing this game on the 18th of September. It is currently the 23rd of
September and I have 100% of the game. It took me seven hours to do that.
Aslan, I know you were planning on possibly putting an hour or so of time into this
game, did you manage to do that at all?
I did not, unfortunately, I wanted to before recording,
but because of my running around this morning,
I was not able to, but knowing that you were able
to get the game done that quickly,
does put this on my radar, higher, ‘cause it looks cute.
So, yeah, so let’s, so introduction, it is basically a very simple
But I’ll let you talk about it more
before I talk about what it looks like.
stargy lake. So it’s, it’s, it’s very clearly taking a lot of, you know,
influence from stargy valley. You take over a farm, you start growing crops, you have a
village where you have other people that you talk to, and you build up your farm,
there’s relationships, blah blah blah, all the usual things. But what I would say I guess is
it is all of those things simple, and it’s very deliberately simple. And I find that very
interesting. It’s not, it doesn’t feel incomplete, but it feels very deliberately simple. So I will get
into that in the examples in the mechanics, but I guess that’s just how I wanted to talk about the
game as a whole. Starting off kind of visuals-wise is obviously pixel art.
you know, not, not top down, not side-on, there was a 45 degrees on, I don’t know how you would describe
45 degree angle pixel art grid based game. Your, your standard stargy like visuals.
The, it does however have like character art for when you’re in the portraits, when you’re talking to
them, which a lot of games have done recently as well. Um, it’s
kind of what you see is what you get. If you look up on, on steam, um, what you see there is
exactly what you’ll, you’ll, you’ll end up with. It’s not more or less than that. It’s very much,
you know, fair advertising on the visuals aspect. Um, and control-wise, it feels very similar
to stargy as well. You’re kind of like moving in a grid based aspect. It took me a little bit of
time to get used to the controls just because I feel like there’s a little bit more of a delay
on stopping moving than I would expect normally.
So quite often I would like move one square more than I was expecting, but that you get, yeah, well, just like when you let when you let go of the button and moves more than you would have expected to after stopping pressing the button. Right.
But I think that’s just something you get used to very quickly, right, because you just your brain starts to adapt to that and you start lifting it earlier than you normally would have.
Other than that is pretty standard. This is where we get into I’m going to talk about the days and the seasons. This is where we get into.
But some of the simplicity of it. So the, the days feel a little bit shorter than stardew. I haven’t actually timed it, but it feels like maybe you’re getting like five to six minutes in a day, where does I think stardew is like 11 minutes in a day, something like that.
It is, it is a fast day, but generally that doesn’t feel faster than you would want because everything is scaled down massively, right, like scale off.
Village things that there are to do stuff like that is massively scaled down. You don’t feel like you feel like you’ve got enough time to do what you want to do.
Seasons are seven days. So a week is a season.
There’s some interesting advantages and some disadvantages. So the advantage I guess is that you can very quickly get through a year and it’s quite satisfying to get through a year.
I suspect most people who play stardew valley don’t ever get through a full year. I suspect they kind of get to like middle of autumn or fall and kind of that’s done right because most people don’t complete things, but it would be very easy to get through a year, you know, very quickly. Like if you were like playing as a session, you could probably get through a year in about an hour and a half.
Which feels very satisfying to me being able to do it that quickly and get through everything. I guess one of the disadvantages of it is if you don’t get things done at the beginning of the season, you’re not going to get them done right because you like some things take five days to grow.
If you don’t plan to on the first day or the second day or the third day, that’s it, you can’t grow it that season. So having said that, because you then only have, you know, 21 days to wait till the seasons back.
Again, it doesn’t feel frustrating. Like I had done. So I did two full years and I had almost everything done, but there was like one thing I hadn’t done in summer. And so I like sped run speed run speed run. I very quickly went. I very quickly did spring so I could get to summer and then do the thing that I’d missed the previous summer because it’s just seven days. It’s really easy to do that.
I don’t know what the phrase is either.
So you would do you mind if I ask a question before you keep going?
So it doesn’t feel because I guess my like reading the description of the game of it,
saying a bite-sized streamline farming sim made me think that it potentially could feel rushed.
So would you say it’s like that perfect pace? Is it a good middle ground of like feeling like it’s
moving? It really is a streamline game, but doesn’t feel like forced or rushed.
I think it depends on what you’re looking for, right?
Like, I could see some people feeling it’s rushed
because, you know, I 100% did it in seven hours.
I can totally see why some people were like,
Having said that, like, you can take it slower, right?
Like, obviously, there is a setting for making your days slower.
Because I didn’t feel the need to.
But I can see why someone wanted to do that.
And it’s not like you’re forced to do any of the things
Like, I got to the point where I was trying to do it
reasonably quickly so that I could, you know,
have done a decent amount before the podcast.
And then I realized I was like, you know,
And I was like, oh, well, never really want to complete
everything before the podcast regarding, right?
I’ve rushed through everything to do that. You could absolutely expand this out quite a lot and take it much slower.
I also have a problem where I tend to speedrun the first.
We bet of farming games anyway because I find when you can’t do a huge amount quite boring.
So I will do my crops and I’ll do the kind of basic things that you need to do to, you know, build up relationships and stuff like that.
And then I’ll just go to sleep. I’ll go to sleep at like, you know, midday in spring one.
Uh, just to kind of like speed things off.
I didn’t feel the need to do that in this one because obviously one the days are quicker and to there’s just more happening quicker.
So yeah, I guess it just depends on what you’re looking for, but you could definitely do that.
that they give you the option because that would be my one point of concern. I think I would
enjoy the fact that it’s like moving at a good pace like moving pretty quickly and I don’t mind.
The fact that it takes seven hours to 100% the game. But if I was in like another move where I
moved, where I did want to take things slower, I would have been curious if it felt like the game
was rushing me. But it’s nice to know that you have the option to like make the game feel slower if you
Yeah, they’ve got standard day length and relaxed day length.
Nice, okay, that’s good to hear.
Mechanics wise, there’s quite a few interesting things they do here,
and I will you will continue to hear the theme of simplified.
I guess maybe streamlined is probably, that’s what they use.
I get why they’re using that phrase, but also I do feel like it’s accurate
to say simplified as well, like it’s all simple.
It is the standard loop, you throw down a seed, you water it, you water it the next
day, and then after a certain number of days, you harvest it.
I guess you don’t have, I can never remember the right word, not owing, telling the land,
you don’t tell the land, it’s automatic.
There’s not like, there’s, you don’t sow seeds on individual plots, you, you sow them
pair a three by three plot so you like you choose a seed
and it will automatically go to the three by three plot so it kind of speeds that up a little bit.
You’ve essentially got then six plots of farming land each of which is a three by three and so you
buy six seeds and then you saw those six seeds and that gives you are was it nine by six plot of land
and probably not doing justice. This is lots of numbers.
I lost you like five numbers ago. I’m terrible with numbers. I’m just like looking up into the
But basically, you’re not sewing them on an individual square basis.
ceiling to be like 9x5, 3x4, like what is going on. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. I can work with that.
You’re doing a three by three block. So if you choose a seed, it automatically throws it to
three by three, rather than doing each individual square.
I can understand that okay
Watering is exactly as you expect. You can either one watering can upgrade.
The first watering can does a one square. You’re like water each individual squares individually.
But then you get there’s a one upgrade that is a three by three. So that speeds things up.
But it’s still again very simple, right? You wake up in the morning, you go see your plants,
Eventually, one of the days you’ll you’ll harvest them, which can it be anything from two days to five days, I think, depending on which plant is.
But it’s exactly what you would expect other than the three by three plot being automatic, everything else is exactly the same, right?
You sow the seed you water it, you harvest it. It’s farming. One more, do you want? There aren’t any more of the complicated things, though, there’s no like fertilizer and stuff like that.
Okay, you don’t really need it because if everything goes by so fast anyway as I would I would
Well, exactly, and it doesn’t have like quality of it. It’s just you have a crop, you have a crop, right? Like, if you have a tobacco, it’s a tomato.
If you’re trying to be a, you know, a streamlined farming game, you don’t add things like that. I totally get why that that’s not there.
Oh, I forgot about an overall thing, your bag. This is the one thing I don’t like about the bag, but I get why they’ve done it, but I still don’t like it. There aren’t, there’s no stack.
So if you have six tomatoes, that takes up six spaces, not a fan of that. But having said that, there’s very little you do with things in this game, other than sell them.
So essentially, you pick up your tomatoes and you throw them straight in the shipping bin. So you don’t tend to be storing anything, but that’s good because the storage in this game is terrible, right?
11, I see 11. I’m watching the pre-recorded broadcast on the Steam page as we’re talking.
bag is get this 11 spaces you can store 11 things in your bag
I’m just watching the gameplay. I just saw the 11 spots that you have.
Yeah, yeah, so it’s a three by four grid, but one of them is taken up by the bin. So it’s not 12. It’s a living
Oh my gosh. Okay. It’s not terrible because of everything else you’ve said, but I’m just like,
oh, if we could just get like a little patch for that, that would be kind.
Yeah, and I was I was I was very annoyed by that initially and then I was like, oh, you know what?
It’s fine because of everything else in the game kind of pushing you towards like just get it done
one chest and that gives you 12 spaces in it. I think it’s 12 rather than 11. Let me check. I’ve got the game running here. Nope. That’s a living as well. The noise six. It’s six. My bad. It’s six. The chest is six. The chest is also like 4000 monies. It’s very expensive compared to a lot of things in the game. So I didn’t buy the chest till the end of the game because there was no point. I wasn’t really using it for anything either.
There is one big disadvantage to this storage and that is if you go and buy a bunch of seeds
Because you don’t think about the storage, right? You go buy 11 seeds because that’s how many can store though
You shouldn’t be buying 11 but let’s say you buy 11 seeds because you buy them actually
No, you actually know I just remembered that this it doesn’t let you buy more than six seeds at once
Because that’s how many you can you can so but if you buy six and then you buy another six
You have to keep those in storage
And because they won’t stack.
You now have six out of your living spaces in your inventory stored up, unless you have the chest, in which case your entire chest is full of seeds, until the next time you can use them, which might be 21 days.
Right? Because of your seasons.
So, it’s not a big problem, but if you’re not thinking about things early on, you might be in the position where you either have to sell seeds you’ve just bought, or, or…
have terrible storage for the next year.
Okay, definitely noted for myself,
‘cause I likely will eventually play this game.
So definitely, definitely noted.
Okay, I watched that happen with all the turnips.
Yeah, okay, at least the shipment chest
but that is overall like frustrating
and I don’t see a reason why.
You shouldn’t be able to stack things in your storage.
Like I know the game is encouraging you to keep going and again just bringing it back to that streamlined gameplay loop.
But I feel like you can still have a streamlined gameplay loop but allow at least stacking in your back.
Yeah, I do think it would, I think it would be better to have stacking.
I don’t think it would hurt the game in any way.
There’s no stamina in this game. It’s purely the time. So if you have the time to do a
thing, you can do the thing.
Oh, that’s nice, actually.
I am, yeah, I’m definitely moving towards the, I, I do think that you should either have
If I want to mine forever.
stamina or time, uh, automatic time. And I, it was the one thing I liked about
you could do that island or wherever it was called.
That terrible game. The one thing I liked about that was it flipped that
around and it had stamina but it didn’t have time like you just decided
when it was the end of the day and I’d like more more games to kind of play
around with that idea but it does annoy me now when games have both and it’s like
I have a limited amount of time but I also have a limited amount of stamina and
And so it’s like, what are you focusing on doing?
And it’s like, if you use up all your stamina, you don’t feel like you should just go to bed straight away because you also have limited, having those two limitations, they’re always in competition with each other and I don’t like that.
Yeah. I agree. I’m the same way. I mean, there’s there’s definitely a reason why I installed mods for Stardew was to be able to give myself the option.
If I want to keep mining for the entire day, but let the time run, I could just turn on the mod and click unlimited stamina and I could just keep mining if I want to if that’s what I’m feeling in that moment.
So I also wish that more games played around with either or of those and allowed for like more.
More flexibility, depending on your preferred playstyle.
For me, it’s like the essence of like limited time takes away from the coziness of a game for me because I feel pressured.
Even though I know I don’t I know I don’t actually have to, but like I still can’t help but feel that pressure because of the time clicking.
Yeah, yeah. I think that’s the thing is like I’m fine with either of them existing, but only one of them, because you know, having a limitation makes sense in your game, but having two of them makes it like especially as you say in cozy games, having two of them makes it doubly stressful, because like in this game, when the time runs out, you’re like, okay, fine. I did all the things I needed to do today, and yeah, I didn’t get everything done I wanted to, but it’s fine because I’ve not wasted stamina.
Because the stamina doesn’t exist, and I used up all my time, and I was doing things the entire time in that time, so it’s not like I wasted anything.
Whereas the problem is it’s like when you run out of stamina and you either have to go to bed or have to, you know, eat something to give you more stamina, you feel like you’re wasting something, because you’re like to take advantage of this limited resource, I have to use up a different limited resource.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I definitely, you are, you are preaching to the choir right now. I want 1,000% agree,
and that has been a big issue for me, I think, with truly, truly getting into, like, more farming games in general,
is it just, it’s, it’s like shuffling of resources and feeling like the pressure.
Even though I know it’s not actually supposed to be pressure, like you can do whatever you want,
you could do absolutely nothing but me being me.
Yeah. It’s still an arbitrary number that it’s taking down the entire time.
Yeah, I can’t exactly. I can’t help but feel the pressure.
For sure. Yeah. So I like that animals. So this is an interesting one. So you can have a dog.
There’s a dog. The dog does nothing else doesn’t exist, but you don’t have to, you know,
have to do anything for them either. So that’s fine. You just, you know, say hello to him in the
morning. He has a little love heart. All good. You move on with your day. Um,
there are cows and chickens. You can buy three cows and three chickens. Um,
you don’t have to feed them. You interact with them once a day to get their buy
product and they’re happy. And that’s it. Pretty much. Um, you can also buy our mayonnaise
Huh, okay, that’s simple.
machine and our cheese machine. Um, but it’s just you interact with it and it automatically
turns everyone you have in storage in your bag into that thing.
So if you interact with it and you have one egg, you get one mayonnaise. If you
interact you have three eggs you get three mayonnaise. But that’s pretty much it.
Okay. That’s nice that it lets you do everything in one go rather than like you have to make one mayonnaise at a time, individually, you can make three in one go if you have the three with you. That’s nice, but I guess you also have to be careful if you didn’t want to make mayonnaise or multiple mayonnaise and you just want to one. Now you just made for five.
I don’t think, yeah, I don’t think you care, right?
The only time I think you would actually care is if for some reason you wanted to make a fried egg
because there’s cooking in this game. But like, there are three things you can do with an egg.
You can sell it for like 60 or you can turn into mayonnaise and sell it for 100 or you can turn it
into a fried egg and sell it for 70. So it’s like, why are you doing anything other than turning
I made exactly one fried egg and it was for the achievement.
All rosely to mayonnaise, got it.
I’ll see if you’re the achievement hunter then you’re doing the fried egg otherwise you’re rolling in mayonnaise
Because there is cooking in this game, the cooking is very simple, streamlined, if
you will, you interact with the kitchen, you choose one piece of food and it either turns
into a different piece of food or nothing happens.
You can do three things a day, so you can do three cooking’s a day in total, and some
things turn into food and some don’t.
if you interact with an egg, it turns into a fried egg, if you interact with a tomato, it turns into a tomato soup, if you interact with corn, it turns into popcorn, if you interact with lettuce, it turns into coleslaw, if you interact with cheese, it does nothing, if you interact with milk, it does nothing, these things are just things.
If you interact with, if you interact with lettuce and you don’t have mayonnaise, you still
get coleslaw, double the mayonnaise, oh, all roads lead to mayonnaise, you’re just rolling in mayonnaise,
You do. It’s one item, one thing. It’s obviously a very… it’s obviously a very simple…
coleslaw. As you say, everything… everything leads to mayonnaise.
The coleslaw is very funny as well. It looks like it’s like rainbow colored.
I don’t know what to say.
All roads indeed mayonnaise is obviously this episode title.
Thank God. That’s so good. That’s so good. I’d be a wreck
possible to store that all with their. But the ores the ores do count towards your storage, but you don’t use them for anything other than gifts and selling.
Okay, all right, so the separate storage for wood and rocks is that just an unlimited storage or is that also limited?
I don’t know. I never went higher than 230 because I didn’t need more than that and by the
time I needed that much I’d already used at all. It’s only for house upgrades and the top
one is 200 of each. So yeah, I suspect if there is a limit, it’s like $9.99 and you
Okay. That’s in my brain. That’s basically all emitted.
don’t need more than like 800 in the entire game. I’m not going to find out if the
there’s a limit. I’m not wasting time. Because it’s one, it’s one rock gives you one rock.
No, that’s totally okay. If anything, that might.
So I’d have to do a thousand rocks. I’m not doing that.
That might be, it may or may not be if I am able to find more time and I’m not running around as much, that might be something that I may try to investigate because I love mining. So that could be a personal projects. Yeah.
That’s the real grinding for you.
That could be my personal project.
Fishing is basically animal crossing fishing.
So you see a shadow in the water, you real, you cast, there you go, you cast your fishing
You see an exclamation mark, you press the button, you reel in.
There’s different like fish.
I think there’s like 12 fish or something like that.
Okay, here’s my real complaint about this game.
There is no list of what fish and crops you’ve got and which ones you haven’t caught.
It’s very annoying because it’s like there is an achievement to catch one of every fish.
But I was like, I don’t know which fish I’ve caught and which ones I’ve not caught.
Oh, yeah. That is. I guess you’d have to break out an Excel sheet.
And that’s very annoying.
I would like a list of all the fish I’ve got.
Well, I mean, I even then, how would I know what I’ve done before?
I don’t know why I’ve done in the past if there’s no log of it, right?
You got it. You got to manually type out the Excel sheet. Every time you catch a fish.
But no, even then, I would, but you’d have to know beforehand to do that.
I spent a year in game not knowing there wasn’t a list and not knowing that I’d even existed.
Yeah, that, that, that, I…
I would agree. That’s, that’s pretty nuts that there’s no list in game, especially since the achievement exists. Yeah, the achievement exists.
because clearly they’re keeping track of it, they’re keeping track of it. Tell me, tell me what I have.
That is valid. That is very valid.
What? The village layout is quite simple. You’ve got your farm and then there’s like the town
and then there’s a foresty area with like a river. There’s a shop for buying seeds and stuff
from. There’s an animal shop and then there’s kind of your usual people around and about and
the usual archetypes. The shop is
interesting. This one is also very similar to Animal Crossing. It will start like four items a day,
and they’re randomly generated. But that adds to the annoyance of the seasons being seven days,
right? Because this is why it took me so long to do tomatoes, specifically for the cooking
achievement. I hadn’t done tomato soup because I didn’t have the cooking facilities because that’s
like the first house upgrade and have that in the first
car here and then the second year I was trying to do all of the cooking as I was going so I was like growing all of the crops I could I didn’t get tomatoes in the shop until day four of the season and they take five days to grow.
So I just couldn’t grow tomatoes that year.
That was really annoying is like why am I not the first day I was like okay fine I’ve not got them today not the end of the world I’ll get them I might get them tomorrow.
go in the second date, still not there.
And it’s impossible for me to grow them.
Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think I also would agree with your complaint there,
but I’m a little bit more lax on that in the sense that at least like, it’s a cozy
game at the end of the day. You’re not supposed to rush it. So like, sure, but like, no, I
rush it. I would, I’d already done a bunch of it. This was me trying to finish the achievements,
and I had to just speedrun a year to get the next season so I could actually grow the tomatoes.
Yeah, but the grind of farming, I thought you liked farming!
I had done literally everything else in the game by this point.
But you gotta keep grinding your farming, you know? It’s therapeutic, you know? It’s cozy!
I spent a lot of time sleeping that year. Let’s put it that way.
You’re a sleep your character caught up all the
your character caught up on all the lost sleep over the past two years and the third year just trying to make to all the energy preservation with sleeping when into the tomato soup that you made.
That was an amazing tomato soup, the whole one bowl of it I made.
Gonna be have like gold flex in it. It’s a sprinkling of truffle like.
There are festivals in the game. They’re on specific days and they’re specific things.
I won’t say too much about them because I feel like that would kind of
ruin the story for people. But they’re fun. I enjoyed them. The tie-in to the characters a lot,
and again, I’m not going to talk about individual characters, but I found most of the characters
interesting and fun to get to know. They are similar
to everything else in the game. They are simplified, streamlined, sorry, but they were fun and a lot of them are kind of, you know,
trophy caricatures as they’re not on the level of stargy, but they were they were fun anyway. The relationship system is the max of three hearts and it’s basically just by gifting them.
There are gifts that they will dislike and there are gifts that they will love, but I found that most items most people liked. So it took quite a while for me to find a gift that someone disliked or that they loved, but you do get it and you get quite a big boost for a love and you do get a downgrade for dislike and it was very sad when I first gave someone something they disliked and I’m like, whoa, what was this reaction? My word, calm down.
is there is when you find out that character dislikes, I guess in this case mushrooms, for example,
I’m sorry that I didn’t know you didn’t like mushrooms, right? You never told me that.
is there a documentation anywhere in the game or is that also lacking? Okay, question answered.
What do you think, yeah, no, I would like, this goes back to the same thing about the fishing
thing. I would like more documentation of this stuff. I’d like a list of the characters and their
Okay, I guess noted for myself to just take physical notes.
heart levels and what I’ve learned about them that would be nice. They do tell, yeah, they do
also tell you in just conversation sometimes, like they’ll be like, oh, I did have one guy tell me
that he didn’t like sunflower seeds at one point, and I was like, “Oh!”
It’s interesting, I wonder why he’s told me that, and then I realized this, because he doesn’t want you to give him sunflower seeds, and you know, I’ve had people tell me, like, “Oh, I love this,” or whatever. It’s great. It’s kind of like, just generic text as you’re talking to them, but it’s there. But you’ve got to
Yeah, definitely I would just have a little notebook
or like a little Excel sheet or something
Excel probably feels over the top.
There’s like four relationships.
Okay, so physical notes are notes in my phone or something.
Yeah, it’s four characters and they all have,
I think, one dislike and one love.
It was fun, so once you get them to one star,
they’ll ask you if you wanna go in and hang out,
and you have a little cutscene with them.
And then when you get them to three stars,
So don’t do it again and don’t.
Talk about how much they like you and there’s very definitely some flirting happening, but there’s no explicit
Romantic rest their relationships, but at least one of them was very much flirting with you and it’s clear there’s something there, but there’s no
Okay, does it feel like this game because I did notice that this or firefly village was
The first game it seems like for this to this developer
Does it feel like there could be a follow-up game in regards to these characters?
So does it seem like it’s like kind of a standalone game since you said that it just kind of like alludes to a romantic something something
But doesn’t like explicitly
I would be more likely, I think, that they would update the game rather than another game that
includes that. I don’t, I don’t think the characters are interesting enough to be like,
oh, here there’s the Firefly Village Extended Universe. It would be fun to have a little bit more
with the characters, but that’s, that’s about it.
Okay, yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, that’s that’s actually a better question.
So you can see this game potentially having like a future update whether it’s free update or DLC or…
Yeah, I mean, I don’t I don’t want to pressure any end of indie dev to do anything like that, but I feel like if there was an update that included, you know, further relationship progression and a few other things, then I could see that it would feel natural, it wouldn’t feel
Okay, cool. Good to know. Yeah, obviously we’re not expecting it or like saying with this need DLC blah, blah, blah
It’s just more so like does it feel like it could potentially happen if the opportunity to present itself which seems to be the case
Yeah, I mean, I think for what the game is,
like it costs nine dollars, I think, seven pounds.
It is, it feels very much worth it.
It’s a fun little experience, right?
Like, you’re not expecting for that amount of money
to have a stargy experience.
It’s from a single day, I mean, I know stargy was as well,
it feels, streamlined as the right term for it.
And I have very much enjoyed it.
And for what the money that it is,
it was a fun little, you know, under 10 hour experience.
I always find it funny when people complain
about games being too short,
when they’re like 10 hours long,
‘cause I’m like, that’s like five films for the price of one.
You know, I get it when it’s like $70.
But when it’s less than 10, you know, you’re getting multiple films worth of content for the
Yeah, I agree. I mean, just from you telling me about it, like, I feel inclined to want to play this game sooner rather than later.
So that in itself is telling someone that does not like to have multiple farming games in the rotation.
And just struggles to pick them up in general, because as much as I like them, it’s also like how many farming games do I need.
But I like that this one is like very, as the word that they use, they picked very good words to describe this game.
Yeah. Yeah, I think of it kind of like, um, uh, Christmas films. Every Christmas film, you know,
what’s going to happen in that Christmas film, but that doesn’t make it less enjoyable
if you like Christmas films. This is very much like the standard tropey farming game. And
you know what you’re getting out of this. But that’s what you’re expecting. And that’s
what you enjoy and you see these things. You’re like, “Oh, it’s this thing. I love this thing.”
So, like, if that sounds fun to you, then this is something that you might want.
And if it sounds like something you’re like, “Oh, I hate these tropes, then don’t watch it.”
Right? Like, if you hate cheesy Christmas films, don’t go watch a cheesy Christmas film. I don’t know what you want from me.
Yeah, okay. Yeah. No, that sounds, I mean, I do like, I do love rather the essence of farming games.
So to have it in a more digestible version is nice, especially because as of as of recently when I do pick up games,
I pick up games in like 30 minute increments. So I could stretch this out over a good while. I make it feel like
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. And yeah. And in that sort of that time period, if you’re
fully valuable without it feeling like overwhelming like start you can feel like even like for me,
like fields of mystery I can feel, etc.
playing half an hour at a time, you could either like do like two to three days if you’re like
taking things relaxed or you could get through a week and have a season every playthrough and you
would still get you know a good like five to ten game.
The game sessions in it before you’re feeling like you’ve done everything.
Yeah, that sounds great. That sounds perfect, honestly. Something just more digestible and less lower
lower stakes but still feeling like a full farming game experience.
Yes, yeah, I agree. I think if if it sounds interesting to you
Listener then it’s probably worth it. You know, it’s it’s cheap enough as well that it’s
Horrible if it’s not something you stick a whole bunch of time into
I mean, it looks it just looks cute.
Oh here we go. I’ve got his four four minutes apparently. It says on the
I’m trying to think, oh, with, okay,
so with the game being shorter,
does it still feel like it’s like more impactful
Like, does it leave a mark on you at all?
Yeah, I’m not gonna be sitting here in two years thinking about this the way I do do with
Obviously, it doesn’t have to be like a strong mark
But in regards to like the characters,
you said you enjoyed them even though they’re trophy,
but does it leave like a little bit of an impact on you?
stargy, you know, five years later, six, seven years later, whether eight years late, I forget so
many years. Um, like, I’m not gonna still be thinking about any of these characters the way I think
about Linus from Stardew, right? But you know I had fun
and there is enough there to be like you know I’ve spent nearly a week
thinking about this game and enjoying it and that’s quite a lot for something as
simple as it is. You’re not gonna, your life isn’t gonna be changed playing it, but it’s fun, you know.
Because I was thinking in like the the mindset of like going back to Wanda stop
Playing that game how short it was, but it’s still it has been ruminating and I don’t know how long it’s going to ruminate in my brain
But it has been ruminating in my brain for quite a while since I’ve played it and again very short game
very simple gameplay loop
left a very big impact on me, but that doesn’t
This game well, it seems like this game doesn’t necessarily do that, but it doesn’t take away from the game either, which is nice
Was just curious if there was like a character moment or something that was like oh man
I’m gonna remember this for a little bit
I mean, I liked a kind of the cutscenes,
but there’s not a humongous amount
that I’m still remembering about them now.
But that’s, yeah, that is what it is.
I will say the one thing I think if you love the idea
of expanding a farm and seeing it go from something small
this is the one thing that I think we’d be missing
from this is very static.
You expand your house and you upgrade your watering can once,
There’s no like adding of land.
There’s no like, you can basically,
the day one you can plant all of the plants
that you’re able to plant in the same as
So there’s not like that you know, greater progression
Right, I mean that’s I think that’s okay. Well, if you wanted to like
Would the game feel satisfying if you did want to like replay it even since you’re not able to like continue expecting?
I could see somebody trying, uh, I could see, uh, speed runner getting into this.
Okay, all right, that’s actually pretty cool.
I’m being like, how, how do I, you know, make the, the most efficient possible?
I could see you someone doing that.
But otherwise, past that, maybe not. Okay, fair. Okay, fair.
There’s, there’s not a huge amount of replay value there.
I don’t think other than speed running.
Okay, I mean, it’s less than $10, so that makes sense. Maybe replay it again, and when you forget
most of the story, like, five years down the line, when haunt or chocolatier is still not out, you know?
you for having me? Really the biggest thing is, thank you for having me again, even though
I wasn’t able to get around to playing this game. I look forward to playing this game.
If you want to find me elsewhere, you can find me on multiple social medias at Ace Trainer,
Whether it’s blue sky, instagram, threads, just not Twitter, essentially, obviously I stream on Twitch, but as of right now I’m doing a lot of co-working because I am melting over preparing for a work-turning that I have coming up in October.
But otherwise Chris and I also just as you were mentioning in the being of the podcast, we are trying to get back into the swing of things with Moo and Coo, so we have our own podcast Moo and Coo that we’re trying to get back into.
Otherwise though, nothing really else. I’m just happy to be here after it being a while because I’ve just been I’ve been wanting to pop in on more episodes and whatnot, but it’s been just very busy and I am like on a even trying to like message me has been on like a three to five minutes business day cycle.
So this was nice to just be able to like record with you and chat with you about a cozy game.
You can find the podcast on tumblr and on blue sky at THS bod you can send us feedback on our website, which I’ve fixed because I
noticed nobody will have heard this while we’re recording, but
episode, which is coming out tomorrow as we record, um, I noticed that the website was broken the contact form was broken on it
And it has apparently been broken since May
So I have fixed that has are so if you’ve been trying to send us feedback on the website and you weren’t able to you can do it now
So that was that was a mistake um
The yes, you can do that there. You can also find links to everything to do with the podcast including a link to our patreon patreon patreon.com/ths pod
Where you can get access to our slack and talk about things and see pictures of Cody’s new
Screaming crying so cute like I saw that. I was like I am gonna throw up. I cannot get over how cute
You can also see Johnny argue about how the Silicon episode shouldn’t happen
And you can also get access to our bonus episodes of the podcast
There should have been one just released when this comes out with me and Kevin talking about this year’s super hero films
I’ve watched all of them. He’s watched none of them
I’m looking forward to that.
It’s a fun it’s a fun dynamic. Let’s put it that way
We’ve got some more coming up obviously. It’s it’s needing the end of the year. We’ll have a game of the year episode
Where we do we do our non farming game of the year on the greenhouse and some other things planned as well
So get up there if you want that. Yeah, I think that’s everything. Thank you. Is Len again for joining me?
Thank you listeners for listening and until next time have a good harvest
The Harvest Season is created by Alan McHenry, with support from our patrons, including our
pro farmers, Kevin Stewart and Alisa.
Our art is done by Micah the Brave and our music is done by Nick Burgess.
Feel free to visit our website, harvestseason.club for show notes and links to things we discussed
All right. Well, thank you anyway with that is but not anyway. Thank you. Yes, great. I don’t know how to respond to that. Thank you
That’s fair, that’s okay.
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