So Sakuna is one of my favourite, if not just plain my favourite, farming sims, due to its obsessively detailed love of real-life rice growing. The game's farming systems are incredibly deep on a magnitude more than basically any comparable game.
But one of the things I think is incredibly strong about it is that it knows what it's doing is both forboding and interesting, and so doesn't feel compelled to force you to learn it right away. It's not a spreadsheet game. It wants you to develop an intuitive sense of rice-growing, not just write down a big tutorial list. And for this reason, it parcels out critical information incredibly sparingly. How far apart should you plant your crops? What water level should they be at - and when? They leave you flailing to answer the basics of these questions yourself for your first few crops, familiarizing yourself through guesswork. Eventually, as time passes, they hand out informational scrolls that drip-feed you useful tidbits. NPCs might chip in with useful advice if you keep talking to them. And you learn a bit. You drain the water during third offshoots to prevent wasteful overgrowth. You avoid overfilling in the early stages when the growth is just starting. You level up and unlock a little planting grid to help with your spacing.
But even at this stage, information is being carefully held back. A player who feels fairly confident in the basics may not even yet realize that water temperature is a thing that the game keeps track of and that it affects your crop quality - the game doesn't even display it until you've gained a few farming levels! Or fertilizer, which you can just entirely miss out on for in-game years if you don't explore much. By being willing to slowly parcel out information and let the player experiment with and process each mechanic at a relaxed pace, the process begins to resemble internal ritual much more strongly than simply fulfilling a list of conditions. And that IMO is what makes its gameplay more than just an interesting take on realistic and specific simulation - the way it uses these unknowns and empty spaces to let you build your own relationship with rice-growing.
It's so fuckin cool. Love that game
