Fantasy Farming: Orange Season Demo

Farming is suspiciously popular when it comes to video games, given the fact that the real life activity features far less bored housewives. On the other hand, it’s quite exciting to grow things, even in a virtual environment. Adding other elements to the mix is a great way to expand the genre, such is the case with the Farming Simulator series that allows you to explore a fairly big map and use a variety of interesting vehicles.

Fantasy Farming: Orange Season is a mixture of RPG elements and farming simulator mechanics, in which you get to toy around with plants, explore beautiful environments and even take care of animals along the way. It features a top-down perspective and a classic interface, although it’s a bit too hotkey-dependant sometimes.

As you might expect, there’s quite a bit of work involved when it comes to growing things, so you need to follow certain steps in order to get the land ready for your next culture. After that, constant care is required to make sure the plants reach maturity, but there are other things to occupy your time with as well. Hence, exploration is a big part of the experience, especially since many of the environments are hand-crafted and quite beautiful.

The RPG elements are not as obvious or as important in the grand scheme of things, but they do affect the gameplay, and they do make the whole thing feel a bit more complex. Thus, your character has an inventory where you can keep tools, items and a few other things, and it’s also possible to learn new skills along the way. It’s also possible to improve your abilities and make farming a lot easier later in the game.

As far as the controls are concerned, it’s worth mentioning that you can use a gamepad as well, just in case you are not a fan of keyboards. In fact, the keyboard hotkeys are a bit strange, since it takes a while to get used to the weird controls. The graphics are not bad at all, but you have to be comfortable with the retro style, given the low-resolution textures and basic animations.

In the end, Fantasy Farming: Orange Season is fairly unique in terms of gameplay and concept, but it needs more content at the moment. Granted, the game is still in early access right now so it’s certainly going to be improved later on.