Japanese Rural Life Journey is what it says on the tin — it’s a 16-bit-style farming sim that takes place within the countryside, and it’s stuffed with hallmarks of the style: You allow town to reach at a broken-down farm that you just revitalize as you meet the townsfolk and grow to be part of their neighborhood. However this one doesn’t really feel cramped or shortchanged on cell. The truth is, it’s designed for the medium.
Launched on Apple Arcade on Sept. 15, 2023, Japanese Rural Life Journey just isn’t developer Recreation Begin’s first foray into life sims nor pixel artwork — the studio can also be answerable for Tiny Island Survival and Tiny Pixel Farm, each of which nail the nostalgic look.
“When growing a brand new recreation, we attempt to create photos of assorted worlds utilizing pixel artwork (for instance, a abandoned island, area, a museum, an amusement park, and many others.),” Recreation Begin founder Takeo Fujita stated in an electronic mail interview. “Once we drew ‘rural Japan,’ we thought ‘it will certainly excite customers,’ and uploaded the picture to social media. The response was past our creativeness, so we started full-scale growth of a recreation with a ‘rural Japan’ motif.”
And that motif is extraordinarily profitable within the recreation — a lot in order that I’ve discovered myself trying to find photos of a real-life place that evokes the city within the recreation. It’s hilly and stuffed with relics of the previous, like deserted shrines and overgrown stone partitions, and I can virtually odor the petrichor of the foggy mornings on the mountainside. However based on Fujita, discovering someplace like this in actual life isn’t any simple feat.
“There isn’t a electrical energy or gasoline infrastructure, and water is drawn from wells and rivers. It might be troublesome to discover a place like this in modern-day Japan,” Fujita stated, clarifying that regardless of the agricultural nature of it, the sport is about within the modern-day. “An outdated folks home deep within the mountains, quietly left behind by the present of modernity. That is the setting of the sport.”
Your purpose within the recreation is to not deliver extra modernity, although — it’s merely to make the place extra livable for you and the opposite individuals who stay there. You’ll repair up a shrine, at which you’ll worship day by day. You’ll buff the scratches and filth out of a grumpy neighbor’s outdated automotive. You’ll work in your farm, rising meals to prepare dinner and feed to your varied pets.
The sport contains the anticipated parts, like power that wanes as you do duties and presents that improve your relationship standings with others. However these aren’t the main focus of the gameplay. The motivation to maintain enjoying lies in opening up new areas of the map — together with the magical realm that was simply added in Oct. 17’s recreation replace — and celebrating as many cultural moments as you’ll be able to, a few of which take the higher a part of an in-game 12 months to organize for.
These cultural parts — just like the recipes and the gosekku — shine a lightweight on traditions outdated and new, non secular and secular. As an example, in spring, you’ll have interaction in ohanami, which merely means to admire the blooming flowers. In winter, you’ll do the “large clear,” the place you wash down your own home in preparation for the brand new 12 months.
“We additionally chosen a balanced number of conventional Japanese occasions which can be held in every interval — spring, summer season, autumn, and winter. We additionally needed gamers to get to know ‘Japanese meals,’ so we developed a cooking mini-game,” Fujita stated.
Picture: GameStart/Apple
The cooking minigame is a pleasure to play, and fills the whole display so that you don’t need to squint to click on on the fitting pot or bowl. Every minigame is nicely thought out, together with fishing — optimized for touchscreens with a tap-to-reel mechanic.
General, the sport is a pared-down model of a farming sim, however that doesn’t imply it lacks depth — it simply implies that as an alternative of 28 days per thirty days, there are two, and as an alternative of infinite missions, there are pointed quests that come up as you progress.
The each day quests may use some work, although. You may seize one in all these per 24 real-time hours, however there’s no mechanic that reminds you to do them, nor any notification that you just’ve failed when the time is up. Nonetheless, the sport doesn’t really want these each day quests, as you may spend wherever from two minutes to a number of hours enjoying Japanese Rural Life Journey.
The Oct. 17 replace, which throws gamers right into a “mysterious world the place spirits stay,” isn’t the final that Recreation Begin has deliberate.
“This 12 months, and even subsequent 12 months, we shall be including new areas the place you’ll be able to expertise Japanese tradition and which can be depicted in pixel artwork. We additionally want to add as many requests as doable from gamers,” Fujita stated.
So in case you’re on the lookout for a mobile-friendly (that’s portrait mode and panorama mode, commuters) farming sim that you would be able to play for weeks on finish, Japanese Rural Life Journey gained’t disappoint. I’ve stored up with my farm on and off for the 12 months because the recreation was launched and haven’t run out of recent discoveries.
Japanese Rural Life Journey was launched Sept. 15, 2023, on iOS and Mac. The sport was reviewed on an iPhone utilizing an Apple Arcade subscription offered by Apple. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These don’t affect editorial content material, although Vox Media might earn commissions for merchandise bought by way of affiliate hyperlinks. You could find further details about Polygon’s ethics coverage right here.
