Harvestella arrived from Square-Enix last week on Nintendo Switch and PC, and while the game was highly anticipated by life-sim fans, there wasn't a ton of coverage in the press for folks to take a look at to get a glimpse of gameplay. Reviews are still pending - including ours from our own Elliot Hilderbrand, who says that the game contains "a mountain" of content.
While we are waiting for reviews to roll in, I took a few hours to run through the opening of Harvestella, finding that it feels familiar while still maintaining that sense of polish one expects from a Square-Enix game. Following very much along with the tropes of a Rune Factory-style game, the player finds their new character waking up with amnesia in a rural town. After the cursory examination from the town doc, the game immediately donks the player over the head with some seeds and a plot of land, suggesting that they get to work.
But what seems at first like standard fare quickly expands into something else, when a fairly deep dungeon-diving mechanic opens up, allowing players to take multiple in-game days to explore dungeons and level up. There is no hope of getting through one of these things in one run; players are instead encouraged to open up new, more direct routes to the end of a dungeon by rebuilding ladders and bridges throughout.
As the player explores, new mechanics are introduced, including several new party members and a deep job-based progression system. Everything you would expect from a game of this style is here, from crafting to base-building. All of this is of course in the service of an overarching story, in this case about a series of crystals that control the seasons suddenly misbehaving. The player character must get to the bottom of what is going on, and three hours into the game, I'm already brushing up against storylines involving time travel, a bunch of suspicious priest-types, and a group of scampy little town kids that keep getting in trouble.
By the time I reached end of the last video above, it was becoming clear that I was just getting started with Harvestella. This is one of those games that feels like looking down into a deep, clear well, knowing that it is just going to keep going and going, deeper and deeper the further you get into it. I'm still just scratching the surface of this "mountain", but we can expect Elliot's review in the coming weeks for a fuller look.
Harvestella is now available on Nintendo Switch and PC.
