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 crammed with hallmarks of the style: You allow the town to reach at a broken-down farm that you simply 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 is just not developer Sport Begin’s first foray into life sims nor pixel artwork — the studio can also be chargeable for Tiny Island Survival and Tiny Pixel Farm, each of which nail the nostalgic look.
“When growing a brand new sport, we attempt to create footage of varied worlds utilizing pixel artwork (for instance, a abandoned island, area, a museum, an amusement park, and so forth.),” Sport Begin founder Takeo Fujita stated in an e mail interview. “Once we drew ‘rural Japan,’ we thought ‘this can certainly excite customers,’ and uploaded the picture to social media. The response was past our creativeness, so we started full-scale improvement of a sport with a ‘rural Japan’ motif.”
And that motif is extraordinarily profitable within the sport — a lot in order that I’ve discovered myself looking for pictures of a real-life place that evokes the city within the sport. It’s hilly and crammed with relics of the previous, like deserted shrines and overgrown stone partitions, and I can virtually scent the petrichor of the foggy mornings on the mountainside. However in keeping with Fujita, discovering someplace like this in actual life is not any simple feat.
“There isn’t a electrical energy or fuel 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 previous folks home deep within the mountains, quietly left behind by the present of modernity. That is the setting of the sport.”
Your goal within the sport is to not convey 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 worship on daily basis. You’ll buff the scratches and dust out of a grumpy neighbor’s previous automotive. You’ll work in your farm, rising meals to cook dinner and feed to your varied pets.
The sport consists of the anticipated parts, 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 enjoying lies in opening up new areas of the map — together with the magical realm that was simply added in Oct. 17’s sport replace — and celebrating as many cultural moments as you possibly can, a few of which take the higher a part of an in-game yr to arrange for.
These cultural parts — just like the recipes and the gosekku — shine a light-weight on traditions previous and new, spiritual 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 “huge clear,” the place you wash down your property in preparation for the brand new yr.
“We additionally chosen a balanced collection of conventional Japanese occasions which can be held in every interval — spring, summer time, autumn, and winter. We additionally wished 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 entire display so that you don’t must squint to click on on the fitting 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 implies that as a substitute of 28 days per thirty days, there are two, and as a substitute of limitless missions, there are pointed quests that come up as you progress.
The every day quests may use some work, although. You may seize certainly one of these per 24 real-time hours, however there’s no mechanic that reminds you to do them, nor any notification that you simply’ve failed when the time is up. Nonetheless, the sport doesn’t really want these every day quests, as you could possibly spend anyplace 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 reside,” isn’t the final that Sport Begin has deliberate.
“This yr, and even subsequent yr, we can be including new areas the place you possibly can expertise Japanese tradition and which can be depicted in pixel artwork. We additionally wish to add as many requests as potential from gamers,” Fujita stated.So if you happen to’re searching 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 saved up with my farm on and off for the yr because the sport 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 supplied by Apple. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These don’t affect editorial content material, although Vox Media might earn commissions for merchandise bought through affiliate hyperlinks. You could find extra details about Polygon’s ethics coverage right here.
