You move to a farm in an isolated community. There, you are tasked with planting and harvesting crops, building or acquiring improvements such as bridges and higher-powered tools, and getting to know the members of the local community. Sound familiar? It should — this is how many farming and life simulators begin, from Harvest Moon to Stardew Valley. But, in 11bit Studios' newest title Crop, things are a little bit different. Instead of choosing to move to your new farm, Crop's protagonist is driven there in the back of a truck and forced into his strange new role with no explanation. And the "friendly" local community players find themselves unwillingly a part of is home to a dark secret — or perhaps several.
GameRant had the opportunity to preview Crop, an upcoming title from Carbonara Games and Frostpunk and The Alters developer 11bit studios. Described as "Stardew Valley meets Twin Peaks," Crop is a hybrid thriller and farming simulator about a hapless farmer who finds himself forced to tend to an abandoned farm in a particularly strange small town. It features a dreamlike, isolated setting, a gameplay loop centered around restoring an ancient, decaying farm, and a central story filled with mysteries that the player will have to dig for just as they dig their crops from the soil.
Crop Embraces The Dark Side Of Farming
As is typical in a game with farming mechanics, as soon as you arrive at your new home, your first task is to learn how to dig and prepare the soil. But in Crop, you don't learn that important lesson through planting seeds given to you by a helpful neighbor, but instead by digging the grave and burying the body of the farm's former owner. Finding out what happened to them and how they met their end serves as a key part of Crop's central story — but the townspeople are not going to be forthcoming, so the player character has to do a lot of digging both literal and figurative.
Farming-focused games are often idyllic, with generally pleasant weather and crops that grow quickly with minimal fuss. Crop takes things in a different direction; as a veteran player of many of the best farming games of the decade, I found this new, refreshing, and quite intriguing. The weather is frequently rainy, and you have to contend with factors like blight, mold, slugs, and disease that can lower the quality of your plants or render them entirely unusable. While the rain means that you often don't have to go about the tedious task of watering your crops individually, you now have to worry about your plots flooding.
I like how Crop really makes you feel like you're starting from zero. Your farm is filled with debris and weeds that you have to clear before you can even think about planting. Bridges are broken, tools are damaged or missing, and, if you want fertilizer, you can't always pick it up at the store — you often have to make and process it yourself. It's a slow, strenuous process, but it really makes every upgrade and improvement you make or obtain feel worth it. But the grind doesn't end just because you've started to make things better — for example, once you've built an irrigation system, you still need to declutter the canals with your trusty shovel, otherwise they will become choked with weeds and dirt due to the constant rain and flooding. I feel that Crop truly embraces the realities of farming in a way that not many games are willing to do. I can definitely see it earning a spot on the list of most difficult farming simulators.
Players Embody A Haunted, Mysterious, Figure
I also pretty much immediately fell in love with Crop's player character, who currently remains nameless as the developers experiment with how much customization the game will feature. He has this blank, haunted stare and haggard frame that really emphasizes what he is going through and the bad situation he's in. With the fear in his eyes and his illness-racked body, he wouldn't be out of place as a Silent Hill or Resident Evil protagonist.
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I definitely felt for the poor guy. He has little memory of his past or how he wound up in this situation. The house he lives in is ancient and messy, with little in the way of actual comfortable furniture — during the early gameplay I experienced, he didn't even start out with a proper bed to sleep in. Crop features an infection mechanic where the player can become ill if he doesn't take good care of himself, and it can be difficult to take that care with what little resources he has available. During the days I experienced, he had only a mild cold that slowed him down slightly, but I'm sure there are many worse illnesses waiting to strike down the poor fellow.
Crop's World Holds Many Dark and Strange Secrets
There is far more to Crop than simply tending to your farm. At the heart of the game is a mystery that the player character must solve. How did he end up there? What happened to the previous owner? Why are others going missing in town? What lurks in the deep, dark woods surrounding his strange new home? What I saw of the game's plot reminded me of titles like Dredge that immediately establish a sinister, creepy, "something is wrong here" atmosphere, and I came away from the preview extremely intrigued and wanting to know more about the game's world.
I like how Crop handles it story UI-wise, too — there is a chart that reminds you of information you've learned and leads you can pursue, with different "branches" relating to different characters you meet. Some will share information with you as long as you promise to keep it secret, while others require a lot more work to get them to open up (and others will emphatically tell you to stop digging.) 11bit and Carbonara are still finalizing how the "story chart" mechanic will work in Crop, but what I saw was incredibly promising.
Crop promises to be an exciting new entry in the farming genre by turning the usual "cozy farming game" formula on its head and instead offering a dark story with plenty of horror and thriller elements. I am excited to play the full game when it releases, as I have been thinking about that poor deceased previous farm owner and what could have happened to her ever since I first laid eyes on the game.