Across the Valley is a hand-drawn style, farming simulator from the small indie developer, FusionPlay. Each in-game day lasts 15 minutes and as your role of farmhand you’ll have to fit in as many missions from the task board as possible before dark. The daily tasks around the farm include planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting crops; feeding, watering, and petting the livestock; and of course, shovelling the animal sh*t.
Tending to your crops is by far the most interactive of your activities. You’ll need to sprinkle your seeds evenly on each plot in your allotment, getting the most coverage possible to ensure the largest yield. You’ll also have to return daily to water or weed each patch and after a couple of days reap the rewards. Your harvest can then be used to feed the livestock or sell for a profit to the farmer’s market cart. The livestock (sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens) will also require daily visits for you to top up their water and feeding troughs, pet them, and muck out their barn. It’s all very simple to get done but feels more like a list of chores than a game and gets very repetitive. Other than your daily routines and a few very short minigames for shearing the sheep and milking the cows there is very little else to do.
The bugs don’t make it any more enjoyable as you’ll be resetting your position every time you teleport around the farm since you drift further and further from the wooden stool you are supposed to be perched on. This even causes you to clip into walls and other objects — at one point we even found ourselves inside a sheep! This, combined with the cumbersome tool interactions, wacky item collisions, and your hands often getting stuck and becoming immoveable, make these simple chores quite the tedious tasks.
Across the Valley has a lovely hand-drawn art style and some good simplistic gameplay ideas, but its execution isn't up to snuff. It’s wide array of bugs, repetitive gameplay, and lack of content leave this farm without its Push Square or Red Tractor approval.
Comments 10
The most unappealing PSVR 2 game just got worse..
I love the psvr2 and think there are some great games for launch but Sony really need to avoid a flood of shovelware like this sort of game as there’s a danger it will drag the psvr2 down with it
Honestly, I thought this game looked super chill and fun, and mindless, especially with the hand-drawn graphics. Too bad about all of the bugs though. If they can fix the bugs I still might try it out down the line.
That's a shame. I was kind of looking forward to a nice Harvest Moon kind of VR game. Garden of the Sea failed to be that, and I had high hopes for this. Very disappointing.
"at one point we even found ourselves inside a sheep!"
Ah, so you play as a Welsh farmer, then?
Damn. Was actually looking forward to this one. On to the next one.
@Hamst88 you could say the same about the PS5 is general. You gotta take the good with the bad, happens all the time.
@NathanKang yes of course - totally agree - but for some reason there seems to be a lot of people that seem to want the psvr2 to fail (which I still don’t understand) so the odd bad game is fine but we don’t want a whole load of 3/10 releases. Although I’ve got to the point where I think I’ll just play my vr games and ignore the media 🤣🤣🤣
I ended up buying this after all, and IDK if it's shameful to admit this but I'm having more fun with this game than I thought I would. I bounced off it hard when I first tried it. It's certainly repetitive, and has its glitches. The fixed position teleportation navigation just sucks, I wish you could move around freely or at least stick turn, I genuinely get into hard to interact situations with the current movement. And of all the weird issues, I think using the hoe to weed is the most obnoxious activity. The motion is imprecise it's hard to get it where it needs to be, it isn't actually fun, and it destroys crops more often than not.
But that aside, I kept telling myself "I'm going to stop right after I finish this crop of corn." "I'm going to stop right after I fill this order for wool" "I'm going to stop right after I upgrade the fields" "I'm going to stop right after I buy the cow", "I'm going to stop right after I get the tomatoes picked".....the mission structure actually is compelling me to keep going when I thought I wouldn't want to. It's not a big game by any stretch but it actually does have a relaxing farming loop and somewhat addictive game loop, at least for a while.
It's not on the top half of the available games, but it's actually an enjoyable little farming sim to get lost in with sufficient objectives to keep it compelling. The review undersells it. If they could fix locomotion and the hoe so that weeding doesn't suck, I think it would be an easy to recommend game.
To be fair, I've not yet played this but from the sound of it, the developers expect the player to do the same thing they did by making and releasing the game: shovel crap.
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