If the likes of Stardew Valley and Story of Seasons just aren't enough, you'll be able to get yet another farming sim fix later this month when Staxel arrives on Switch.
"A creative farming and village life game with a cast of quirky characters", Staxel has you building and customising your very own village Minecraft-style. You'll be exploring your world from a first-person perspective, redesigning your surroundings as you see fit and keeping on top of things as the seasons come and go.
Of course, you'll be doing some actual farming, too. Expect to be filling it up with crops and animals, meeting locals and befriending your favourites, and earning extra cash by taking up a range of hobbies. You'll also find bugs and fish to catch, fossils to excavate, and quests to complete – it just wouldn't feel right otherwise, would it?

The game was first released on PC back in 2018, but fret not – we're told that the Switch version "has been carefully optimised for maximum performance and integration with the key features of the device".
If you're interested, you can pre-order it from the eShop now for $17.99, down from what will become its usual price of $24.99. Staxel launches on 23rd September.
Comments 18
This type of game is so oversaturatsd now, and I haven’t seen a good one since Littlewood- and people complain about metroidvania s
@Mystique My thoughts exactly. I don’t want to knock on devs cause I’m sure a lot of these games are great but with all the similar titles out there it’s hard to care at this point.
@Mystique
These games have a unique problem though, they all compete for time because they're designed to sink a lot of time into.
Metroidvanias on the other hand are designed to be replayable, but can be brief depending on how you approach them.
A good Metroidvania can be played over and over as you learn the map and the intricacies of the system, and comfortably return to it months or years later.
@RupeeClock The same can be said about some farm sims. I’m way more efficient at Stardew Valley now, 500 hours later, than I was when I started. It’s fun to see how fast I can complete certain goals.
@Panopticon
Whilst true, you spend a lot of time with any individual farm sim. You have to pick one and commit to it, so you need to pick the best one, and that's still Stardew Valley right now.
I like the voxel look, but aside from that this trailer makes the game look simplistic and a bit pants.
just like rogue-likes and 2D metroidvanias, these games are a dime a dozen these days. I'm sure many in the genre are good....but the genre is just so flooded
it reminds me a little bit of minecraft
@RupeeClock Can’t argue with that. Stardew is not just my favorite farm sim, it’s probably also my favorite game of all time. And I’ve been playing games for the past 27 years starting with the NES.
@RupeeClock Are metroidvanias designed to be replayable, though? They're one of my favorite genres, but I basically never replay any of them at least until many many years later. They lose a lot of the luster once you actually know all the secrets.
@Meteoroid Hey dude, you can't go disagreeing so strongly without telling us (a) why? and (b) what game you would pick instead?
Please & thank you 😁
@gcunit Personally I would say for a switch RPG farm sim game Stardew is #1. If I was talking farm sim in general speaking I play FS19 on PC with mods with a strong multiplayer community and I Prefer the realistic gameplay aspect. I also grew up playing the original Harvest moon so Stardew always holds that nostalgia for me and I also I can play co-op with my kids.
@honshu Any views on Farming Simulator for Nintendo Switch (or whatever it's called, and not the 2020 version)?
@Meteoroid Ah, for a moment I thought you were going to hit me with a farming-sim missile that had passed under my radar. I'm simultaneously disappointed there's not a new contender for me to consider and relieved that my radar is still reasonably effective.
MineCraft meet StarDew Valley....
Gotta be honest, I think I could build this is in Minecraft.
I like the look personally. For someone like me, this type of game is technically a bit easier to sell to because I actually dislike the overall art style for Stardew Valley, whilst something like this feels a lot more consistent in that sense.
(No hate on Stardew as a whole before anyone jumps to conclusions, I'm just big on art styles in games)
If it's not for you, or you think you've played too many, I think that's fair and good on you. But I think it's important to note that whether the genre is flooded or not, that's a developer problem, not a consumer problem.
If you wanted a different type of game, these devs weren't going to be the ones to give it to you in the first place because this is clearly what they wanted to do.
All this does is benefit those who wanted a bigger selection of this type of game, thus allowing them to choose one that suits their preferences best.
Best of luck to this dev though, it will be exceedingly tough to sell, but maybe you'll get lucky and attract a bunch of fans who dig the style like myself.
Rune Factory is the ultimate farm sim game. Followed by Stardew Valley. Story of Seasons (formerly known as Harvest Moon) used to be the tits, but the most recent game was a dissapointment.
The snappy movement, bizarre characters, intricate crafting system, complex farming, dungeon crawling, and monster collecting in Rune Factory outpaces pretty much everything else in this genre.
@Meteoroid Rune Factory 4 is superb. I don't have it on Switch just because it's painful to think about restarting again after all that I accomplished on the 3DS version. It's the only farm game that has clicked with me.
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