austin

here comes the boy

writer | storyteller | podcaster | ???


I bounced pretty hard off of Rune Factory 5 and wondered if maybe my time with the farming/RPG hybrid genre was passed. But I'm devouring Harvestella so far.

There's nothing especailly deep happening here. The writing is mixed, even if the world is interesting. I haven't set up one sprinkler yet. The combat is very straight forward even if some of the classes are unique. There is very little voice acting, and one of the rare, repeating lines (one that plays whenever you leave your farm) is very abrasive. You can feel the budget constraints.

And yet! The Vibes.

This is very much a game at its best in total, more than in part. But the music, world design, some core story conceits, and the sense of style just overwhelms all of that.


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in reply to @austin's post:

That's very cool to hear! Rune Factory 4 is one of my all time favs in the genre, but I couldn't deal with 5's performance issues at all. The demo for Harvestella surprised me when they introduced a time traveller into the story on top of the whole Quietus situation. So I'm curious to check it out!

Sometimes I feel the older I get and the less time I have to invest in games and other media, the more weight Vibes hold over my decisions on what to play or watch. Your writing might be mid, the soundtrack might be background noise, and the graphics might be just north of standard, but by god if you have brought an immaculate Vibe, I'm invested.

I was going to wait to get to this game until around the holidays because that's when it usually "feels" best to play them, and I had intentionally been ignoring things about the game to keep as much a surprise as possible, but these pics are making me want to break that and get to it sooner. Glad to hear it's got a cool mood.

Yeah I'm not sure how I feel on this yet. I'm not disliking it, but it's also not pulling me to play it whenever I have a free chance yet either.

Weirdly the thing it keeps connecting to in my brain most closely is Crystal Chronicles, and I don't fully know why it feels like that. Other than maybe that they both have similarly sparse budgets going on lol

Tempted to get it but I have so much on my plate right now. Also, I'm disappointed SE didn't promote this more. There are barely any reviews from the big outlets (not that I place much stock in that, but this is more SE not doing anything).

I really appreciate hearing about it - the steam reviews are mixed and fairly devoid of helpful information, but this does sound like a great game for when you just want to vibe & do some various activities. Sounds like a great "over christmas break" game as there aren't any huge RPGs dropping this year

I noticed this floating around here and there on Steam in the past couple of days, thought it was cute if a little empty-looking in screenshots, definitely a weird little asset-flip indie game from China or something. Turns out it's a Square game?! What to heck