The Reveal:
Become a farmer, explorer, and animal trainer in this new farming-life sim called Everdream Valley. With what looks like elements inspired by Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon and Yonder the Cloud Chronicles; spend your summer holiday helping out your grandparents revitalize their farm while exploring the beautiful valley and making some new friends along the way! And yes, you can pet the dog!
Wishlist, pre-order & and play the demo on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/1403650/Everdream_Valley , coming soon to PC & console!
Demo Review:
Everdream Valley is a soon to be released farming and life sim set on your grandparents farm nestled in this beautiful, vibrant and lush valley. This game includes a character creator, open world exploration, day and night cycles, free placement of most things, controller capabilities and more! It reminds me a little bit of Stardew Valley and Story of seasons.
First let’s talk about the character creator, because we all know the customization of our characters is an important aspect to gameplay in life sims! The customizer is fairly good, you can change face shape and select from a variety of eyes, noses, and hairstyles. There is also quite the large selection of eyebrows but the mouth options are few and look fairly similar.
This demo was GREAT! It gave us 60 minutes of game time – in that time I was able to play through a few days. We get the introduction to the story base as a kid visiting our grandparents farm during a holiday (our parents ditched us because they have to “work”). The text boxes offer a nice easy to read font, with current and relatable vocabulary with very few grammatical errors.
The initial game audio is quite loud and I wish I had turned it down before I started my demo. Getting into the menu was easy enough after the initial storyline scene. The menu itself is very user friendly with plenty of options. Many language options are available, audio controls, keybinds, and graphics settings with some adorable farm animal imagery present.
There IS a minimap! Thank goodness for this quality of life piece – had date, time and key locations as well as where you’re tracking something. Tutorials are present in their own tab, in case you click through them (I’m awful for this) so you can revisit anytime!
Controller options do exist, although I found them not perfectly responsive with my XBOX controller.
Here are some things I got really excited about as they were happening;
- WE GET A DOG! I won’t spoil anything more than that – and yes you can pet them!
- There is an injury status if you get bit by a duck or stung by bees and remedies to heal you (very Animal Crossing: New Horizons moment here)
- Some of the mini-games for crafting are unique and a nice change of pace from the basic ‘craft and walk away’ style.
All in all, I’m VERY excited for this game and if you liked what you read, you should be too! You can currently pre-purchase on Steam for $26.00 CAD (20% off until May 30) when the game releases!