Image source: Phoenix Labs media kit
This will be a short post today since I’m fairly tired from a long day. (As an aside, as I have tried to get into the daily writing habit, I have found it to be a lot more challenging to do than my art habit. I think that it’s because with art, there are long stretches where I’m in a flow, say, filling in a background or cross-hatching a large, shaded section. In that flow, I’m not really making a ton of decisions, I’m just fully engaged in a specific task, and time flows without me realizing it. Writing, on the other hand, has me constantly checking if I’m using the right word, checking if my argument is logical, and just generally making sure that no errors get through. I think it’s because when I’m writing, I find it hard to get out of my editor mode. It’s something that I really need to work on when doing first drafts so that I can feel less constrained in that creative phase of writing.)
Whenever I get hyper fixated on something that is bothering me (today it’s an error I let slip through), I can feel that focus hanging heavy in the pit of my stomach. It’s funny because I make great catches and good suggestions 99.9% of the time. But, as my favorite podcast—the Happiness Lab—notes, we are evolutionarily wired to focus on the negative. I have to make an effort to focus on the goodness that exists 99.9% of the time.
While I’m getting to that retrained focus on the positive, sometimes I have to engage in activities that take my mind off of pretty much everything except for that particular activity. For me, farming simulators are my addiction. Games like ConcernedApe’s “Stardew Valley,” Disney’s “Dreamlight Valley,” and the more challenging “Don’t Starve” by Klei plunk me into miniature worlds where all I have to do is gather resources, plant crops, sometimes fend off monsters, occasionally romance villagers, and mostly just explore and relax. Each of these games follows pretty much the same pattern, with dials on difficulty turned up or down. I can play them for hundreds of hours until the allure of the day-to-night and season-by-season pattern becomes stale.
I had been in-between these games when Phoenix Labs’ “Fae Farm” came out. I’ve been so busy with work that I hadn’t really been paying attention to game releases, which is why I had no idea this game had come out. Of course, I do follow “cozy game” TikTok (though I had missed this particular release), where users give a heads up on “cozy games,” which can include farming sims, but mostly focus on games that don’t focus heavily on combat and don’t place a high amount of value on extremely hard difficulty levels (I suppose the opposite of that would be the dreaded Elden Ring, which I actually enjoyed, even if it had me pulling my hair out in frustration at times).
So, I was pleasantly surprised when “Fae Farm” dropped. And now I’ve found myself completely sucked into this tiny farming world. This isn’t a review post, as there have already been plenty of reviews (from Kotaku, which found the game fun but depressingly similar to other games of its type, to CNN, which praised the game’s diversity).
This is more of an appreciation post. The world of Azoria instantly grabbed hold of my attention and allowed me, even if just for a few hours, to take my mind off of all of my worries. So, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll end this post so that I can do a bit more mining to find the copper ore that I need from the Saltwater Mines.
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