Farm For Your Life

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of the brainstorming session for this game. I would like to imagine it went something like this:

“Guys. We need a new game idea. Everybody shout-out his or her favourite game genres, quickly. I’ve got a mani-pedi at two o’clock.”

“Erm… Farming sims are popular?”

“Yes! Fantastic. Other ideas?

“Tower defense? Zombies? Zombies are cool.”

“Yes. Excellent. Keep going. We’re on the clock, people.”

“If we are doing farming perhaps we could include a mash-up with a restaurant sim. From field to table sort-of-thing?”

“Love it! A Harvest Moon meets Diner Dash. But don’t forget to add the zombies.”

“Zombies, boss?”

“Exactly. Anything else? I have 30 seconds. You. You, in the corner. What are you playing on your phone?”

“Erm, me? … Fruit Ninja.”

“Perfect! Get it in there. I want to see a demo by Friday! Laters!”

Door slam.

Now I am not saying Farm for your Life has been rushed by any means, in fact it is a very well put together indie game. But you can’t escape the fact that it is a bizarre Franken-game stitched together from various game genres that you wouldn’t necessarily think would work together, and yet somehow, weirdly, they do.

Farm for your Life is a farming simulation where you grow your own crops to feed your hungry post-apocalyptic restaurant customers before zombies overwhelm your tiny farm and holdings and drag you off to the forest, like your poor old Pa.

The objective of the game is to single-handedly rebuild the farm and feed the population, find your missing cow and then potentially find what happened to your Pa who was last seen having a Zombie tea-party in the woods. Although your player-character really couldn’t seem less bothered about finding his missing dad and is much more interested in cooking baked potatoes for the passing traders.

In fact, your farm seems to exist solely to feed a daily influx of these passing traders who will give you a share of their scrap in return for a bowl of tasty soup or a glass of fruit juice. Scrap you can use to build better equipment and various types of weaponry to keep the hoarde at bay.

You get to haggle over just how much a bowl of food is worth and once you strike a deal they will sit in your restaurant until you honour it. They will sit there whether it takes you five minutes or five days to serve them and completely oblivious to the many zombies that could be currently rampaging through your property. They will not shift an inch till they get their order. There’s no tipping mechanism so the only come back on you is that they block out a space in your restaurant and use up your very limited supply of plates and glasses. Also, their glassy dead-eyed stares are creepy and weird.

Weird is pretty much par for the course for this game though. Just have a look at an average daily action queue. Plant a vegetable, water your crops, harvest a vegetable, throw a potato at a zombie, serve a customer grape juice, chop down a tree, harvest another vegetable, make soup, get a tomato from the veggie rack, throw it at zombie, wash a plate, manoeuvre corn-loaded war machine to a new location, negotiate a price for new recipe, learn the new recipe by slicing ingredients into a bowl in a fruit-ninja style mini-game, then hire some staff so you can continue to expand your bizarre potato-currency based empire.

The combat is all food based. When you are not feeding your clients with your home-grown produce then you are flinging it at the heads of wandering zombies before they can break into your restaurant and… steal your vegetables? It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, especially when the bartering system seems deeply costly. To be honest it seems like the sensible thing to do would be for my farmer to open up a restaurant that caters to the zombie’s insatiable hunger for veggies.

There is a mode where you can turn off the constant zombie harassment and just focus on the farming and restaurant, but then that just removes any semblance of point the game may actually have had. And to be honest if you just want to farm then there are better farming sims out there.