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 full of hallmarks of the style: You allow the town to reach at a broken-down farm that you just revitalize as you meet the townsfolk and turn out to be part of their neighborhood. However this one doesn’t really feel cramped or shortchanged on cellular. In actual fact, it’s designed for the medium.
Launched on Apple Arcade on Sept. 15, 2023, Japanese Rural Life Journey isn’t developer Sport 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 creating 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.),” Sport Begin founder Takeo Fujita stated in an e mail interview. “Once we drew ‘rural Japan,’ we thought ‘this may certainly excite customers,’ and uploaded the picture to social media. The response was past our creativeness, so we started full-scale improvement 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 looking for photographs of a real-life place that evokes the city within the recreation. It’s hilly and full of relics of the previous, like deserted shrines and overgrown stone partitions, and I can nearly scent the petrichor of the foggy mornings on the mountainside. However in line with Fujita, discovering someplace like this in actual life isn’t any simple feat.
“There isn’t a electrical energy or fuel infrastructure, and water is drawn from wells and rivers. It could be tough to discover a place like this in modern-day Japan,” Fujita stated, clarifying that regardless of the agricultural nature of it, the sport is ready within the modern-day. “An previous people home deep within the mountains, quietly left behind by the present of modernity. That is the setting of the sport.”
Your intention 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 reside there. You’ll repair up a shrine, at which you’ll be able to worship every single day. You’ll buff the scratches and dust out of a grumpy neighbor’s previous automobile. You’ll work in your farm, rising meals to cook dinner and feed to your varied pets.
The sport consists of the anticipated components, like vitality that wanes as you do duties and presents that enhance your relationship standings with others. However these aren’t the main focus of the gameplay. The motivation to maintain taking part in lies in opening up new areas of the map — together with the paranormal 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 arrange for.
These cultural components — just like the recipes and the gosekku — shine a lightweight on traditions previous and new, spiritual and secular. As an illustration, 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 property in preparation for the brand new 12 months.
“We additionally chosen a balanced number of conventional Japanese occasions which might 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 your complete display screen so that you don’t need to squint to click on on the proper pot or bowl. Every minigame is effectively 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 signifies that as an alternative of 28 days monthly, there are two, and as an alternative of limitless missions, there are pointed quests that come up as you progress.
The day by day quests might use some work, although. You’ll be able to seize one among 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 actually need these day by day quests, as you could possibly spend wherever from two minutes to a number of hours taking part in Japanese Rural Life Journey.
The Oct. 17 replace, which throws gamers right into a “mysterious world the place spirits reside,” isn’t the final that Sport Begin has deliberate.
“This 12 months, and even subsequent 12 months, we can be including new areas the place you’ll be able to expertise Japanese tradition and which might be depicted in pixel artwork. We additionally wish to add as many requests as potential from gamers,” Fujita stated.
So should you’re on the lookout for a mobile-friendly (that’s portrait mode and panorama mode, commuters) farming sim which you could play for weeks on finish, Japanese Rural Life Journey received’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 latest 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 could earn commissions for merchandise bought through affiliate hyperlinks. You’ll find further details about Polygon’s ethics coverage right here.