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 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. Actually, 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 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 footage of assorted worlds utilizing pixel artwork (for instance, a abandoned island, house, a museum, an amusement park, and so forth.),” Sport Begin founder Takeo Fujita mentioned in an electronic mail interview. “Once we drew ‘rural Japan,’ we thought ‘it will absolutely 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 pictures of a real-life place that evokes the city within the recreation. It’s hilly and crammed with relics of the previous, like deserted shrines and overgrown stone partitions, and I can virtually odor the petrichor of the foggy mornings on the mountainside. However in response to Fujita, discovering someplace like this in actual life isn’t any simple feat.
“There isn’t a electrical energy or gasoline infrastructure, and water is drawn from wells and rivers. It might be tough to discover a place like this in modern-day Japan,” Fujita mentioned, 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 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 worship day-after-day. You’ll buff the scratches and grime 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 power that wanes as you do duties and presents that improve 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 magical realm that was simply added in Oct. 17’s recreation replace — and celebrating as many cultural moments as you may, a few of which take the higher a part of an in-game 12 months to organize for.
These cultural parts — just like the recipes and the gosekku — shine a lightweight 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 12 months.
“We additionally chosen a balanced collection of conventional Japanese occasions which can be held in every interval — spring, summer season, autumn, and winter. We additionally wished gamers to get to know ‘Japanese meals,’ so we developed a cooking mini-game,” Fujita mentioned.
Picture: GameStart/Apple
The cooking minigame is a pleasure to play, and fills your complete display so that you don’t need to squint to click on on the precise 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 a substitute of 28 days monthly, there are two, and as a substitute of infinite missions, there are pointed quests that come up as you progress.
The each day quests may use some work, although. You may seize one in every of 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 really want these each day quests, as you possibly can 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 will likely be including new areas the place you may expertise Japanese tradition and which can be depicted in pixel artwork. We additionally want to add as many requests as potential from gamers,” Fujita mentioned.
So should you’re searching for a mobile-friendly (that’s portrait mode and panorama mode, commuters) farming sim that 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 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 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 could find extra details about Polygon’s ethics coverage right here.