Echoes of the Plum Grove

It's a fun little cozy farming sim with an added element of aging and generations and death. It feels like there's some actual danger you could get into but it's not overly dark. The art is adorable. I'm having fun!

"Buy this for your 8-year-old child" I really love cozy games, and based on the graphics and reviews, *Echoes of the Plum Grove* seemed like it would be interesting for me. I snagged it on sale, and looking back, I’d have been a little annoyed if I’d bought it at full price. I made it to the middle of fall on my first playthrough, and by the end I was so bored that I don’t see myself ever continuing it. Usually, with games, once I get the hang of how they work, I start a new playthrough to avoid making the mistakes. With this game, I don’t see any point in starting over. The graphics are easy to get used to and enchanting; they aren’t overly detailed, but have a charming, hand-drawn style – though it did take me a little while to be able to tell the town’s inhabitants apart. The characters are all likable and completely peaceful, and within two months — after chatting with them in two-step easy conversations every time I meet them — I’ve won their complete affection. However, they aren’t very exciting, and although the community is supposedly put to the test after a while in the game, it wasn’t clear to me how they would behave in a dangerous situation. The controls feel a bit strange at first, because we move our two-dimensional character through a two-dimensional environment using a camera view with a relatively narrow field of view. We can’t see very far, but everything important is easy to spot. The town takes time to explore it all, even with the fast-travel points. At the same time, despite the missions that townspeople give us relatively often, we essentially have nothing else to do but walk through the forest and the streets every day, collect various raw materials, and make chit-chats with the neighbours. On our farm, we can grow different crops depending on the season: we plant, water, and harvest. Every crop has a shelf life, and once it rots, we can turn it into fertilizer using a compost bin, and use it for better quality. However, it takes more than a day to produce a single unit of fertilizer, while I’ve planted 4–5 different types of crops in at least 9–10 rows across the fields. The production time for other raw materials — and the various machines or tools, that can be made from them — is also very long, so in that sense, the game is definitely “cozy” in that everything requires time and patience. Each piece of garden equipment (such as a preserving jar or a drying rack, for example) requires a number of components, which aren’t that easy to come by at first, so you’re really just collecting coins from selling products that are nearing their use-by date. You visit the various vendors on a daily basis – their current stock is always changing – and try to buy the parts. The quests aren’t particularly exciting, and constantly wandering around the village and tugging at bushes isn’t entertaining at all. The fishing minigame is one way to pass the time, but there isn’t much difference in how the various fish behave, and even the ones that seem harder to catch can be reeled in relatively quickly. After 28 hours of playtime, a story had only just begun to take shape (if at all), and I’d reached a point where the game gave me a pile of tasks to complete (at the point furthest from my farm on the island...), but the daily routine is so uninteresting to me that I simply can’t see when I’d ever get around to finishing them. By way of comparison: I’ve played Stardew Valley to an almost unhealthy extent (over 5k hours), and I’m always happy to start a new game. I’ve spent a similar amount of time playing My Time at Portia; I really love the cozy possibilities in Medieval Dynasty; I quickly got to grips with the world of Sun Haven; and even the similarly repetitive and simple world of No Place Like Home managed to keep me hooked for a while. Most recently, I’ve spent 60–70 hours or so playing Havendock, and although I haven’t finished it yet (the cozy atmosphere does turn into quite intensive management after a while), it still has potential. In contrast, *Echoes of the Plum Grove* is a charming game for 6–8-year-olds, and although I’ve read in many places that it has some survival aspect, based on the gameplay mechanics I’ve encountered in just under thirty hours, I doubt it will ever become exciting for me.

我现在已经是人生赢家了 家里有两亩地 三头牛两头羊 翻新了房子 娶了镇长的女儿 未来计划生几个孩子继承我的家产

My sister love this game, she plays it on my account everyday. She said it can reproduce so 10/10

I brought this game last October but didn't play much as I had other cosy games to play, but felt a huge urge to get back into it so made a new save and judging on my hours 😂these pass few days racking up just over 20 so roughly 6 hours each day it's so cute, so cosy and so versatile in what sort of gameplay you want, for me I wanted a cosy relaxing no stress so turned off decay, durability, illnesses and aging of my character and have succesfuly got my spouse to be the mayor who was the original blacksmith rowland and we now have two but a third child on the way, one apprentice, one miserable sod 😂and one in the "oven". Highly recommend this game to those who absolutely love farm mechanics and socialising like other farming sims but want something more lively and interactable events and socialising wise

好喜欢这个画风 好喜欢这个画风 好喜欢这个画风 太可爱了 太可爱了 太可爱了 缺点也挺多，手柄键位奇怪，锁定视角，教程稀烂。但这个画风，还能说什么呢？溺爱了

As a kind of colonial-era simulator, this is kinda cool. You've got a huge farm to work with, lots of villagers to interact with, plenty of recipes and opportunities to build out your farm the way you like it. The papercraft style is very nice-looking. I just kept waiting for it to be fun for me, and it never was. There's no real connection to the story. The dramatic beginning falls flat ("oops, your friend's dead! welp, here's your farm, you pay taxes in a week") I spent most of my time just walking from place to place (fast travel helps a bit, but skips collectibles in between that you kind of need). The interactions quickly got repetitive. I guess the insult option is new, but it's just: OK, this person likes you less now. Why? This might be a nice meditative game to play while listening to an audiobook or something, but as much as I wanted to enjoy this one, I just couldn't.

Cute storyline. You can make it more cozy if you turn off the food rotting system and sickness or more difficult if you leave it on. The storyline is pretty unique.