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A lighthearted farming sim, with a touch of magic | Full Review - Everdream Valley

2K View2023-06-04

Everdream Valley

9.3

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Everdream Valley is a third person farming sim developed for the Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, this game offers a refreshing and immersive experience across multiple platforms.

🟩Pros

+Diverse variety of crops, and adds animals to the mix

+Dream mechanic for the animals and sleeping

+A sense of exploration and Discovery

+Charming art style and relaxing music

🟥Cons

-Quality of Life issues

-Harvesting needs some work to be more enjoyable instead of repetitive

From the moment you step foot into the beautiful Everdream Valley, you'll be captivated by its vibrant and magical atmosphere. The visuals are simply artistic, with lush landscapes, charming characters, animals, and a lighthearted child-friendly tone all throughout. The soothing soundtrack further enhances the immersion, creating a serene and inviting ambiance as you embark on your relaxing farming journey.

In Everdream Valley, you find yourself on your grandparents' neglected farm, ready to breathe new life into it. The game presents you with the opportunity to clean up the farm, help your grandparents, bring back the animals, and embark on quests that serve as both the story and introduction to the game’s mechanics. Although you can entirely do things at your own pace.

The quest system in Everdream Valley offers a structured path to follow while also allowing for some flexibility and exploration. The quests serve as a roadmap, leading you through the necessary steps to make meaningful progress. However, there may be times when you receive quests that require access to areas you haven't unlocked yet. In these situations, the game encourages you to focus on other available quests or activities to continue making progress. This approach allows players to tackle tasks at their own pace and explore the game's world more freely.

There is a lot to do in this game. Starting with the variety of animals: The game offers a decent variety of animals; cows, chickens, deers, sheep, fish, and dogs to engage with. There are different tiers of animal breeds to provide a sense of progression and variety, allowing players to choose their preferred level of complexity in animal management. Everdream Valley lets you have a pet dog from a variety of choices, the game lets you train it, play with it, or pet it.

Everdream Valley also introduces a captivating dream mechanic later on that allows you to assume the role of any of your farm animals during the night in a mini-game fashion. In these dreams, your objective is to protect your animals from a menacing wolfpack. Exploring the dream world uncovers hidden content and quests..

As for the farming, Everdream Valley offers the traditional variety of fruits and vegetables for you to cultivate, allowing you to create a bountiful and diverse harvest on your farm. From raspberries to apples and everything in between, the game provides a wide range of crops to cultivate and protect. I also love how the game allows you to easily move and customize trees and crops, giving you the freedom to design and rearrange your farm to your liking. However, harvesting isn’t as pleasing and satisfying as I thought it would be, to the point of being annoying and feeling like a chore to do, instead of having that rhythmic and meditative quality to it like other farming sims.

You are not just an “animal whisperer" or a farmer though, and you can also engage in other activities such as being a carpenter or engineer, crafting and making structures, you can also be a fisherman, beekeeper, miner, breeder, and many more professions involving farm work aside from farming and cultivating crops. Some of the activities have mini-games of their own as well, such as cutting wood or cooking.

Everdream Valley adopts a slow-paced gameplay style, giving players ample time to complete tasks, explore the world, and engage in various activities. The leisurely passing of days creates a relaxed atmosphere, allowing players to immerse themselves fully in the farming experience. They can end the day at any time by sleeping in the house to pass the time.

There is a cooking system that comes with a mini-game as well. Initially, stamina is annoyingly limited, but as you unlock cooking recipes, you can expand your stamina pool. This gradual increase in stamina provides a sense of progression and allows you to undertake more tasks each day, enhancing your efficiency and productivity. However, I can’t help but get frustrated by this system that limits my play, considering the map is big and the game requires you to constantly jump around it. A minor gripe, but I also don’t like how your movement is constantly impeded by bushes and plants.

Exploring the game's world is rewarded with the discovery of valuable items and resources needed for future building projects even for free. This incentivizes players to venture beyond their immediate surroundings and uncover hidden treasures and maybe even quests. I have a minor gripe about the map system, and how frustrating it is to use when you are running and opening the map at the same time, leading to unintentional movements of the map, as pressing the "W" key while running causes it to shift upwards.

These kinds of issues are prevalent throughout the game, and Everdream Valley is really in dire need of a QoL (Quality of Life) makeover. From core game mechanics like harvesting crops or cooking recipes to simple things like inventory management, the stamina system, or even something as trivial as the aforementioned map system, many aspects require significant improvements to create a solid gaming experience and eliminate any pain points.

Conclusion:

Everdream Valley is a charming and enchanting farming adventure that offers a delightful blend of farming, animal care, exploration, and magical elements. If you can get behind its quality of life shortcomings, the variety of animals, crops, and activities provides a rich and immersive experience that captivates players of all ages.

Mentioned games

Everdream Valley

9.3

Get

Breathe new life into your grandparents' neglected farm | First Impressions - Everdream Valley

Everdream Valley is a delightful and lighthearted farming adventure game that combines the joys of tending to a homestead with farming, animals, and magic. Following in the footsteps of farming games like Dinkum and Stardew Valley; Everdream Valley promises to be another solid addition to the farming sim genre. In Everdream Valley, you find yourself on your grandparents' neglected farm, ready to breathe new life into it. The game presents you with the opportunity to clean up the farm, help your grandparents, bring back the animals, and embark on quests that serve as both the story and introduction to the game’s mechanics. Although you can entirely do things at your own pace.

lyndonguitar3K2023-06-04

Grow crops, fix fences, and train dogs in this relaxing farming sim - Everdream Valley Quick Review

PLAY IT OR SKIP IT? Play it if you’re a fan of farming games. Everdream Valley has modern 3D graphics, but it feels like it could be a hidden prequel to Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon. Instead of running your own farm, you play as a kid spending their summer vacation with their grandparents. Your grandparents aren’t in the best of health, and their farm has definitely seen better days. If you’re up to the challenge, there are crops to water, animals to care for, and locations to explore. The game is cute and cozy, but it’s also filled with things to do, so if you’ve got the farming bug, it should keep you busy for quite a while.

Ndi6K2023-06-12