Japanese Rural Life Adventure is my favorite mobile farming sim

Japanese adventure in rural life is what it says on the tin – it’s a 16-bit style farming simulation set in the countryside and full of features of the genre: you leave the city and arrive at a run-down farm, which you revive over time Meet the city residents and become part of their community. But on mobile, it doesn’t feel cramped or understaffed. In fact, it is designed for the medium.

Released on September 15, 2023 on Apple Arcade. Japanese adventure in rural life is not developer Game Start’s first foray into life simulations or pixel art – the studio is also responsible for that Surviving on a small island And Tiny pixel farmboth of which meet the nostalgic look.

“When developing a new game, we try to use pixel art to create images of different worlds (e.g. a desert island, space, a museum, an amusement park, etc.),” said Game Start founder Takeo Fujita in an email -Interview. “When we drew ‘rural Japan’, we thought, ‘this will surely delight users’ and uploaded the image to social media. The response was beyond our imagination, so we began full-scale development of a game with the theme of rural Japan.

And this motif is extremely successful in the game – so much so that I looked for images of a real place that were reminiscent of the city in the game. It’s hilly and full of relics of the past, like abandoned shrines and overgrown stone walls, and I can almost smell the petrichor of misty mornings on the mountainside. But according to Fujita, finding such a place in real life is not an easy task.

“There is no electricity or gas infrastructure and water is sourced from wells and rivers. It might be difficult to find a place like this in modern-day Japan,” said Fujita, clarifying that despite its rural nature, the game is set in modern times. “An old folk house deep in the mountains, quietly left behind by the current of modernity. This is the setting of the game.”

However, your goal in the game isn’t to create more modernity – it’s just to make the place more livable for you and the other people who live there. You will build a shrine where you can worship every day. They polish the scratches and dirt out of a grumpy neighbor’s old car. You work on your farm, growing food that you can cook and feed to your various pets.

The game includes the expected elements, like energy that drains as you complete tasks and gifts that improve your relationships with others. But these are not the focus of the gameplay. The motivation to keep playing is to explore new areas of the map – including the mystical realm just added in the October 17th game update – and to celebrate as many cultural moments as possible, some of which take up most of a game in Take advantage of the game year you can prepare for.

These cultural elements – like the recipes and that gosekku – Shedding light on old and new, religious and secular traditions. For example, in the spring you will get involved Ohanamiwhich simply means admiring the blooming flowers. In the winter, you do the “big cleanse,” where you clean your home to prepare it for the new year.

“We have also selected a balanced selection of traditional Japanese events that take place in each period – spring, summer, autumn and winter. “We also wanted to introduce players to ‘Japanese food,’ so we developed a cooking mini-game,” said Fujita.

The cooking mini-game is fun and fills the entire screen, so you don’t have to squint to click on the right pot or bowl. Every mini-game is well thought out, including fishing – optimized for touchscreens with a tap-to-reel mechanic.

Overall, the game is a stripped down version of a farming simulation, but that doesn’t mean it lacks depth – it just means that instead of 28 days per month, there are two missions per month, and instead of endless missions, there are targeted quests that emerge as you progress.

However, the daily quests could use some work. You can get one of these every 24 real-time hours, but there’s no mechanic to remind you to do it, nor is there a notification that you’ve failed when time is up. Still, the game doesn’t really require these daily quests as you can spend anywhere from two minutes to several hours playing it Japanese adventure in rural life.

The October 17 update, which takes players into a “mysterious world where ghosts live,” isn’t the last that Game Start has planned.

“This year and next, we will be adding new areas to experience Japanese culture, depicted in pixel art. We also want to accommodate as many requests from players as possible,” Fujita said.
So if you’re looking for a mobile-friendly farming sim (portrait and landscape, commuter) that you can play for weeks, Japanese adventure in rural life won’t disappoint. I’ve been keeping up with my farm for a year since the game’s release, and I haven’t run out of new discoveries.

Japanese adventure in rural life was released on September 15, 2023 for iOS and Mac. The game was reviewed on an iPhone with an Apple Arcade subscription provided by Apple. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These have no influence on the editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find More information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.