I’m a big fan of Harvest Moon-type slice of life games. Stardew Valley was definitely the biggest revival of that genre. While you can argue that farming sims have always been popular for things like mobile or Facebook games, but something about the slice of life aspect of the game is a lot more fun than the farming itself. The farming mainly provides a consistent diegetic form of game play that isn’t immersion breaking. Similar to fighting game mechanics, farming provides a series of tasks to do in order to build up whatever in-game capital to keep the rest of the story moving.
In Verdant Skies, the focus is less on farming and more on it’s slice of life aspect. As a space colony where you are the primary source of farming and physical labor, it feels like there should be more to do, but the map is fairly small and lacking in variety. There are things still indicative of the farming sim genre, like completing bundles, scavenging for natural resources, and upgrading your tools, but it’s really, really easy to finish building your farm. The money you make from selling your goods is pretty much only good for buying blueprints, which goes by pretty fast, and some stuff for decorating your house from the colony’s store.
For people that like Animal Crossing and really enjoyed decorating their houses, I can attest that Verdant Skies’ decorating function is still pretty fun! On the other hand, it’s purely aesthetic. Unlike Animal Crossing, there is no one that really visits your place or gives it a rating based on your style or anything like that. Not to mention the stuff you buy from the store is pretty damn cheap compared to how easy it is to make money in the game.
I’m also a sucker for crafting heavy games. In Skyrim, adventuring was just a way to collect ingredients and junk to make potions and poisons and build armor. If the game would’ve let me, I would’ve become the best damn smith and alchemist in the world with my own store front. Alas, my crafting dreams are rarely realized. Still, Verdant Skies offers a fun crafting system, complete with benches, boxes, 3D printers, and gene splicing. The only downside is that your gene slicing storage is the same storage you have for storing your seeds, and once you collect one of all the possible crops, you don’t have a whole lot of room to keep collecting random seeds to splice together to make better crops so it weirdly disincentives you to not hoard and craft.
But let’s get to the main part of the game: the people. There are colonists that come to the colony as you make it more and more suitable for proper living, like building roads and a plaza. As you do certain tasks, that allows for more people to come, too. The characters, like real people, start off very withheld. The only way to get more is to keep talking to them (as opposed to gift giving), though completing their ration requests/bundles also boosts their friendship, but those are limited and hard to complete at the start of the game. The characters are fully fleshed out, even though they may seem flat at the start. In games, I think we’re used to seeing the full personality of a character as soon as we meet them, unlike real life where people don’t really want to give you their life stories when you first meet them.
The diversity of the characters is absolutely phenomenal. I think the farming sim/slice of life genre has lacked a lot in diversity, or when there is diversity, it’s minimal or surface level. Here, the diversity isn’t only the color of skin but the lives of the characters. One character, I found out, is asexual which was amazing to find out! The only odd thing about the romance in the game is that I’m not sure if it’s my choices that made people think I was into them or if the game automatically puts you into a romance route when you hit six hearts with a character. When the character asked me if I would still be interested in a relationship with them (someone I don’t think I had flirted with) even though they have no desire for a physical relationship, the option to pursue the relationship was “I’m in love with your soul!” which is an awkward option to choose seeing as the option only allows you to start dating the person. If there was a third option of “I still want to be with you” instead of “I’m already in love with you” and “no I’m no longer interested”, I feel like I would’ve been more open to that particular romance.
Regardless, I would heavily recommend this game to anyone that has already put in a few hundred hours into Stardew Valley and need something similar to play. It’s a little less focused on game play, but it’s still just as addictive to try and be the best damn space colony farmer you can be. Not all indie games can have the polish of something like Stardew Valley, but Stardew Valley is anomaly in and of itself.
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