The anti-Stardew Valley era of farming sims has arrived

Crop is a psychological horror farming sim with a lovecraftian twist

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.

I didn't see enough of the game to get a sense of whether the gameplay feels rewarding, but it also seemed like gratification wasn't entirely the point here. You could feel a sense of accomplishment from, say, selling your produce. But the most appropriate noun here might be relief: you withstood the challenge.

In this way, Crop also resembles a survival game. Fittingly, Crop also makes the player more aware of their body than they might be in a typical cozy game. If the player doesn't take the necessary precautions — like wearing a raincoat when it's pouring outside — the protagonist can get sick. In the demo, an 11 Bit rep showed the main character going into a supply store to buy medicine, so I didn't get a full sense of how these status effects will influence the larger experience. Presumably, though, your character will be less capable if they fall ill as a result of not taking care of themselves.

Similarly, if you don't take care of your crops against pests like slugs, they can become 'lousy' and therefore less valuable. As time goes on, you can unlock tools like a water pump that can automatically water your plots. But Crop doesn't necessarily get easier, just more complex. Farm enhancements, like irrigation, still have a chance of failing. Siemienkowicz casually mentioned that weather conditions, like flooding and drought, may also impact your harvest.

So if Crop isn't a power fantasy, and many of the game's mechanics sound slightly miserable, what is the incentive to experience this? On some level, Crop is a more realistic depiction of farm life, which will entice anyone who has grown bored with the cozy genre. But Crop's juiciest carrot is its psychological horror story.

"What begins as a routine cycle of growth and upkeep gradually twists into something far more ominous, pulling players into an eerie mix of investigation, time and inventory management, and slow-burning tension," reads a press release for Crop.

In the game, there are villagers that you can get to know via a spooky and optional mechanic called Mind Roots. Some of these storytelling beats are time-sensitive and can be missed by the player, adding a sense of urgency. The player also knows something Lovecraftian is happening behind the scenes. One of Crop's denizens, a blunt cop called Astrid, tells the player the previous farm tenant was eaten. Another villager, Greta, is just as logical as Astrid but is more willing to acknowledge the paranormal. Then again, when you're presented with a vehicle descending into a giant pool of blood, as Astrid witnessed during my demo, you can't really deny that something funky is going on. But even as the player confronts the impossible, they're grounded by limits: you need to equip boots to reach the muddy area around the car.

Crop doesn't have a release date yet, but Carbonara Games is targeting a launch on Steam. Ten years after its release in early access, and with a major update pending, Stardew Valley remains as popular as ever. It's unlikely that any game, Crop included, can slow down the farming sensation that popularized an entire subgenre of games. But whenever Crop comes out, it will be a part of a burgeoning cadre of dark life-sims, like Neverway and Grave Seasons, that do the next best thing: turn the cozy game genre on its head.