Farming in video games has very little to do with quickening the pulse, and a lot to do with soothing it. If you’re picking up a trowel and dibber, you’re probably up for a tranquil game session. Just whispering the words Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley into someone’s ear is likely to send them into a blissful slumber.
Agriculture says ‘f*** that noise’ and moons you from the top of its tractor. It chucks on time limits, hazards and gameplay objectives. It attempts to make farming into quickfire tasks that can be succeeded or failed, as if it were a sporting event. It’s about as blissful as getting woken up at 5am by a rooster. It’s not what we expected at all.
Let’s waste no time in throwing you into a level as, well, that’s what Agriculture does too. There’s no time for tutorials: you just have to get on with it.
You have a couple of farming patches, mapped onto a grid and viewed top-down, much like Stardew Valley. You are a farmer, and you have a few coins in your pocket, as well as an objective to plant a certain number of fruit and vegetables, as seen in the top-right of your screen. Without further ado, the timer starts ticking down.
You rush to the shop, a location at the top of your garden, and buy the relevant seeds. There might not be enough cash for all the carrot, pumpkin or lettuce seeds that you need, so you’re going to have to make do for now. Then you’re hurrying to your plots to plant them.
The d-pad has everything you need. Left is the hoe, which digs over a spot, ready for planting. Right is to plant the seed, and then Up is to water it. Down is reserved for weedkilling – something that comes in the last third of the game – so you can ignore that one for now. Using them in sequence nets you a healthy crop, and you can harvest it – again with Right – and bring it to a hopper which sells what you have. That garners you cash, which you can use to buy the remaining seeds. At last, the circle is complete.
In the opening moments, this is pretty much all you have to contend with: simple farming tasks against the clock. In these moments, the challenge comes from wrangling the controls. It takes a while to realise that you have to be standing in, not next to, the plot you want to tend. And the squares are small enough that it’s very easy to miss or fail to select the plot you need.
The degree of challenge is way, way down to the bottom at this point in the game. If you’re like us, you will be comfortably completing the levels in half the required time. You can stop and have a Rich Tea if you fancy, which is very on brand for farming. But the difficulty starts to creep up from there.
Soon, you will have more crops than you have water in your watering can. That means shuttle-runs to the well (whose garden contains a well, shop and hopper?), which is something else to think about. If you leave an unwatered crop for too long, then it dies, which isn’t going to help you at all. But after that, crows start swooping in, and you have to shoo them if you want a seed to stay where it should be. And then there’s the weeds, which need a spray of weedkiller to put back on track.
The objectives tighten up too. You have less money and greater numbers of fruit and veg to plant. The timer comes down as well. Agriculture gains a little strategy by forcing you to think about what you plant first. Should you get a run of carrots going, or should you opt for a watermelon to bring in some immediate big bucks (it’s $250 for a pumpkin in Agriculture, so inflation is in full force). Stirring the pot further are some upgrades, bought on a per level basis, which allow you to plough, water and plant up to nine squares at a time.
It sounds a lot but is, oddly, not enough. Through 50 levels, Agriculture truly struggles to find new ways to get you working. One level asks you for one of each produce; another asks you for 200 of just carrots. These are the extremes, and Agriculture tinkers with numbers inbetween. You might need more of certain crops and less of others, and the timer and starting cash might differ. But these are the only levers Agriculture has to create new levels, and it’s not close to being enough. When each level is only an increase in carrots from the one before, you know something is up.
There are the usual farming joys of planting, harvesting and then using the resulting cash to buy something better. Suddenly being able to water nine squares at once gives us a blissful shiver every time we do it. But it needed some help, some support from the levels, objectives or hazards to make it more varied.
And, of course, you’re tearing up all the good work with each level. Whatever you unlock, build or develop in one level is not carried over to the next, and Agriculture made us realise how much persistence is important to a farming sim. You need to feel like something has grown, and the lack of that growth is a big miss to Agriculture. It led to deep, guttural sighs as we spotted a ‘175 tomatoes’ in the objective, and trudged over to the shop to start buying them.
Full credit to Agriculture and developers Nerd Games for giving this idea a punt. There was always going to be a question mark hovering over whether farming could be translated into a fast-paced action game. The attempt is well-presented and colourful – a bite-sized Stardew – yet we don’t think the conclusion is a positive one.
By slapping on a time limit and throwing crows at us every ten seconds, Agriculture started losing the simple joys that make farming games great. Nothing we were growing had any real purpose. We weren’t building up to something better. And worst of all, we were feeling on edge rather than relaxed. If anything, Agriculture gave us a real urge to go back and play our favourite farming sims – and for that, we’re kind of thankful.
