If all these airy-fairy fantastical worlds aren't serious enough for you, the Farming Simulator series enables you to put your nose to the grindstone and drive tractors, harvest crops and watch numbers go up without all that romance and relationship nonsense.
Switch has a few Farming Simulator entries to choose, and if you're not one to enjoy a long, languorous journey to success, you'd be better off sticking to the more abstract, more attractive, friendlier farming sims.
However, once you get into Farming Simulator's low-key and repetitive groove, there's a wealth of wholesome, calming work to get lost in and a satisfying flow to cultivating a field, sowing seeds, harvesting, repeating and watching those numbers go up. Getting the key to a brand-new combine harvester never felt so good.
Throwing mining, monster-slaying and scavenging into the sim-style mix, Forager has you building an island community, expanding out and defending your land from nasties. This game is a life sim game for those who find Stardew Valley a bit too slow for their tastes.
A few clumsy design choices are overcome with a sizeable dose of charm, so if you're looking for a not-that-slow life, Forager might be just the ticket.
Games are often about escapism, and Garden Story offers yet another way to lose yourself in the virtual world: the hero protagonist is a grape, burdened with great purpose. Garden Story may lure you in with its Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley-like aesthetic, but this game about community and saving the world turns out to be an RPG in farm sim's clothing.
If Stardew Valley was less about turnips and more about receiving corpses via the deliveries of a communist donkey, then removing the skin, organs, and blood of said corpse in order to make paper, fertiliser, and stamina potions, then burying the body in your own personal graveyard... Well, then you'd have Graveyard Keeper.
Surprisingly dense and more suited to long playthroughs than short 15-minute bursts, this graveyard-management game has plenty for you to do — as long as you're not squeamish.
Harvestella could be described as a high-end 'good' game, if that makes sense. Its performance issues and rather simplistic mechanics hold it back from being great, but its quest design, dungeon exploration, and successful fusion of very distinct gameplay mechanics make it quite compelling all the same.
The $60 price tag feels a little high for what’s on offer here, but this is absolutely a title that we’d recommend farm sim fans buy when the inevitable sales start to crop up. Harvestella may not be a challenger to Stardew Valley’s crown, but it does enough to distinguish itself as a worthwhile experience anyway.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure released on Apple Arcade in July 2023 and a year and a half later, the Switch release brought a charming cast of Sanrio characters and their island resort to the Nintendo audience—an audience ultimately in for a good time.
This proves an innovative entry into the social sim genre. Borrowing from multiple powerhouse games — such as New Horizons and even Breath of the Wild — it brings a fresh experience that is likely to subvert the expectations of any Animal Crossing expats looking for their next cosy fix.
A fantastic tribute to Fantasy Life that nails the kind of grindy combat that many people love, Kitaria Fables is genuinely sweet and impressively well-made for a three-person team in under three years. If Fantasy Life is a Wagyu beef steak, Kitaria Fables is a really, REALLY good burger, so if you're jonesing for a tasty action-farming adventure, Kitaria Fables has you covered.
For people who loved the collect-craft-combat loop of Fantasy Life, this game might scratch that same itch, and it'll certainly take up a fair few hours – even if the "combat" part is missing. Littlewood is an incredibly impressive game for a solo developer, and though none of its ideas go particularly deep, it more than makes up for it in breadth. Fans of the life sim genre should definitely seek this one out.
Lonesome Village takes elements of life-sim legends and a large handful of Zelda references and wraps them together in very cute packaging. It may not have the richest narrative, but it will absorb and soothe you – even in its short playtime.
Barring a few drawbacks with player experience, specifically around menu navigation, this game offers up some good wholesome fun without the sweaty button-mashing of combat. If you’re puzzling over a new cosy game to play, Lonesome Village just might be your solution.
For the most part, Mineko’s Night Market will be enjoyed by people who like to curl up with a compelling narrative and relaxing tasks. It’s fun gathering materials and discovering secrets. And you can PAT THE CATS?! Without sneezing! What a joyous, allergy-free delight.
We ran into some bugs and issues at lunch, but an extensive update for the game addressed snags on Switch, so if a secretive (sometimes comedic) story with night market stall management sounds up your alley, you'll want to get your paws on this little life sim.
Remember Recettear, the game that replaced Harvest Moon's farming guff with running a shop? That mantle has been taken up by Moonlighter, a recent RPG roguelite that combines dungeon crawling with the art of shopkeeper.
It hits a sweet spot somewhere between satisfying swordplay and nitty-gritty economic sim, although some players may feel it gets ‘grindy’ after a while in its mechanics. Nonetheless, Digital Sun Games has produced a lush work it can be proud of; one that even touches on our humanity in an optimistic way.
My Time at Portia has crafting at its heart, and its timers and missions can be tough to grasp at first. Give it time, though, and it may very well become one of your most-played Switch games.
Set in the titular post-apocalyptic town, it's your job to bring Portia back from the brink by completing missions and crafting your way back to prominence. Your relationships with the townspeople grow along with your crops and — provided you can get over that initial crafting hump and put up with imperfect performance on Switch — there's a good chance you won't be able to tear yourself away.
The sequel, My Time at Sandrock, covers much of the same ground, although we preferred Portia.
The MySims games work as a simple, less demanding alternative to other social sims. The generous and (mostly) well-presented combo of MySims and its more entertaining sequel MySims Kingdom will occupy youngsters and genre completionists for a long time.
The lack of motion controls in this Switch bundle is puzzling, but MySims Cozy Bundle remains an engaging, easygoing pair of Sims spin-offs.
Palia isn’t anything special, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. There’s a fun gameplay loop to engage with here that fans of farm sims will be sure to enjoy, and though the MMO elements feel rather underbaked in this pre-1.0 release, the microtransactions don’t feel overbearing and there’s enough solo-focused content here to make it worth trying out.
It would be tough to recommend were it a full-price retail release but as a free-to-play offering, you’re sure to get at least an afternoon or two of good fun from it. Ultimately, it costs nothing but time and storage space to give Palia a shot; we’d suggest you download it and see if it’s for you—especially if you can’t get enough of farm sims.
Plantera Deluxe is an incremental little game that puts you in charge of garden which you tend periodically. The game saw release on both 3DS and Wii U, and while the Switch 'Deluxe' version doesn't add a whole lot, the base game is just as addictive as ever.
Obviously, its mobile, casual clicker nature isn't as deep as the other winners above and below, but if you're after something to really unwind with and the others all seem like too much hard work, Plantera will keep your green finger(s) occupied.
Potion Permit makes an effort to implement engaging minigame mechanics through potion brewing and patient diagnosis, but outside of that, a lack of challenge and a feeling of repetition means it struggles to stand out in the vast field of life sims. Still, it presents a fun and enchanting experience which gets a massive shot in the arm from excellent presentation in both the audio and visual departments.
Potion Permit fits the bill for something to pick up now and then and pass a few hours, then, and there are certainly enough quests for you to sink your teeth into and keep you entertained for a while, even if it's not as catching as the very best in the genre.
The real draw of this game is simply the ability to play Rune Factory 3 on a console that doesn’t have ‘DS’ in its name. About 90% of the experience is exactly the same as the original, and that remaining 10% doesn’t exactly cover a whole lot.
Luckily, Rune Factory 3 is and always was a great farm sim/RPG hybrid, and it’s something that we can still easily recommend to new and returning players alike. If you fall into the latter group, we’d encourage you to consider carefully how much you want to shell out to replay this on modern hardware. It’s a great game, but it’s effectively the same thing as your DS copy.
Adding some traditional RPG elements into its Harvest Moon-style farm sim gameplay, Rune Factory 4 Special adds dungeons into the mix of farming, fishing, cooking, and romance and serves up a tasty concoction in the process.
One of the game's greatest triumphs is how it melds all those gameplay elements into a thoroughly satisfying whole. If you played it on 3DS, there's not enough here to warrant double dipping, but if you're after a modern classic with equally satisfying farming and combat that lets you decide your own pace, Rune Factory 4 delivers on all fronts.
Rune Factory 5 is available too (as well as Rune Factory 3 Special and Guardians of Azuma, both of which you'll find further down the list), but we still think Rune Factory 4 is the better offering.
Guardians of Azuma manages to reinvent itself while still maintaining the bones that make the Rune Factory series feel like itself. It takes bold new strides in unexpected directions that thankfully pay off.
The expansive village system distances you from the farming in this entry, in a way that highlights exploration and combat. It takes quite a few resources to build robust villages, which reinforces a balanced tempo of advancing the main plot and exploring the wild areas in between bouts of pruning building layouts.
Although there's less of an emphasis on farming than you might expect, Guardians of Azuma is a must-play for Rune Factory fans and would be well-enjoyed by newcomers to the series as well. And for anyone playing on Switch 2, the NS2 Edition upgrade is well worth it.
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