Japanese Rural Life Journey is what it says on the tin — it’s a 16-bit-style farming sim that takes place within the countryside, and it’s stuffed with hallmarks of the style: You allow the town to reach at a broken-down farm that you just revitalize as you meet the townsfolk and develop into part of their group. However this one doesn’t really feel cramped or shortchanged on cell. In reality, it’s designed for the medium.
Launched on Apple Arcade on Sept. 15, 2023, Japanese Rural Life Journey will not be developer Sport Begin’s first foray into life sims nor pixel artwork — the studio can also be accountable for Tiny Island Survival and Tiny Pixel Farm, each of which nail the nostalgic look.
“When creating a brand new recreation, we attempt to create footage of varied worlds utilizing pixel artwork (for instance, a abandoned island, area, a museum, an amusement park, and so forth.),” Sport Begin founder Takeo Fujita stated in an electronic mail interview. “Once we drew ‘rural Japan,’ we thought ‘this can certainly excite customers,’ and uploaded the picture to social media. The response was past our creativeness, so we started full-scale growth of a recreation with a ‘rural Japan’ motif.”
And that motif is extraordinarily profitable within the recreation — a lot in order that I’ve discovered myself trying to find photographs of a real-life place that evokes the city within the recreation. It’s hilly and stuffed with relics of the previous, like deserted shrines and overgrown stone partitions, and I can virtually odor the petrichor of the foggy mornings on the mountainside. However in line with Fujita, discovering someplace like this in actual life isn’t any simple feat.
“There isn’t a electrical energy or gasoline infrastructure, and water is drawn from wells and rivers. It could be tough to discover a place like this in modern-day Japan,” Fujita stated, clarifying that regardless of the agricultural nature of it, the sport is about within the modern-day. “An previous folks home deep within the mountains, quietly left behind by the present of modernity. That is the setting of the sport.”
Your goal within the recreation is to not convey extra modernity, although — it’s merely to make the place extra livable for you and the opposite individuals who reside there. You’ll repair up a shrine, at which you’ll worship each day. You’ll buff the scratches and grime out of a grumpy neighbor’s previous automobile. You’ll work in your farm, rising meals to prepare dinner and feed to your varied pets.
The sport contains the anticipated parts, like power that wanes as you do duties and presents that improve your relationship standings with others. However these aren’t the main focus of the gameplay. The motivation to maintain taking part in lies in opening up new areas of the map — together with the magical realm that was simply added in Oct. 17’s recreation replace — and celebrating as many cultural moments as you’ll be able to, a few of which take the higher a part of an in-game yr to organize for.
These cultural parts — just like the recipes and the gosekku — shine a light-weight on traditions previous and new, non secular and secular. For example, in spring, you’ll have interaction in ohanami, which merely means to admire the blooming flowers. In winter, you’ll do the “huge clear,” the place you wash down your house in preparation for the brand new yr.
“We additionally chosen a balanced collection of conventional Japanese occasions which are held in every interval — spring, summer time, autumn, and winter. We additionally wished gamers to get to know ‘Japanese meals,’ so we developed a cooking mini-game,” Fujita stated.
Picture: GameStart/Apple
The cooking minigame is a pleasure to play, and fills the whole display so that you don’t should squint to click on on the fitting pot or bowl. Every minigame is properly thought out, together with fishing — optimized for touchscreens with a tap-to-reel mechanic.
Total, the sport is a pared-down model of a farming sim, however that doesn’t imply it lacks depth — it simply signifies that as an alternative of 28 days monthly, there are two, and as an alternative of infinite missions, there are pointed quests that come up as you progress.
The each day quests might use some work, although. You’ll be able to seize certainly one of these per 24 real-time hours, however there’s no mechanic that reminds you to do them, nor any notification that you just’ve failed when the time is up. Nonetheless, the sport doesn’t actually need these each day quests, as you would spend wherever from two minutes to a number of hours taking part in Japanese Rural Life Journey.
The Oct. 17 replace, which throws gamers right into a “mysterious world the place spirits reside,” isn’t the final that Sport Begin has deliberate.
“This yr, and even subsequent yr, we shall be including new areas the place you’ll be able to expertise Japanese tradition and which are depicted in pixel artwork. We additionally want to add as many requests as attainable from gamers,” Fujita stated.So if you happen to’re in search of a mobile-friendly (that’s portrait mode and panorama mode, commuters) farming sim which you can play for weeks on finish, Japanese Rural Life Journey received’t disappoint. I’ve saved up with my farm on and off for the yr because the recreation was launched and haven’t run out of latest discoveries.
Japanese Rural Life Journey was launched Sept. 15, 2023, on iOS and Mac. The sport was reviewed on an iPhone utilizing an Apple Arcade subscription offered by Apple. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These don’t affect editorial content material, although Vox Media could earn commissions for merchandise bought by way of affiliate hyperlinks. You will discover further details about Polygon’s ethics coverage right here.
