Stardew Valley did more than reinvigorate a genre: it was the catalyst for an entire culture built around the concept of cozy games. For more than a decade now, bright and cheery games about small town farms have been inescapable. The phenomenon has gone on long enough that we’ve shifted into the counterculture phase of the happy trend. Crop, the newest game from publisher 11 Bit Studios, aims to lead the charge.
Polygon saw a hands-off demo of Crop at the Game Developers Conference back in March, during which representatives from 11 Bit Studios walked us through a 20-minute alpha of the game. Crop is the first title from studio Carbonara Games, a Norwegian group of three veteran developers who have worked on indie darlings such as Death’s Door and Snufkin.
Crop begins with the player waking up naked in the middle of the forest, with no clue how they got there. The only thing that the deep fog and shadows make obvious is that this is not a fairy tale. Heavy rain and howling wind make for an ominous, foreboding soundscape. The first item of action is obvious: find some clothes and shelter.
By pushing the player to seek safety, Crop immediately reveals its overarching approach to the player experience. The verbs in Crop — tilling, watering, sowing — will sound familiar to anyone who has played a farming sim in the last decade. Some genre conventions, like fixing your homestead and managing an energy cap, are also present in Crop. But the circumstances couldn’t be any more different. You aren’t gifted a plot of land by your grandfather: you have simply stumbled onto an abandoned ranch. You aren’t here to escape fast city living; you are forced to tend to a farm that isn’t actually yours. You learn how to do basic tasks, like digging, by unearthing a grave.
“There is a familiarity here for this gameplay loop, and it gives you this sense of comfort and safety almost,” says Gabriella Siemienkowicz, communications lead at 11 Bit Studios. “But we really shouldn’t forget how we ended up on this farm.”
Like many farming sims, Crop requires patience. Making anything happen in the game, like building a bridge to reach a new area, takes time and work. But even within that framework, Crop‘s pacing is slower and more methodical. You don’t just fertilize soil with a single press of a button, for instance. You actually have to wait a few days for the soil to soak up the extra nutrients.
