Farming in a Galaxy, Far, Far, Away…
It’s easy to feel spoiled for choice when it comes to farming simulators on the Switch. With over two dozen different options, it takes a certain special game to stand out from the rest. From heavy hitters like Stardew Valley, Story of Seasons, and Harvest Moon, to smaller known titles like My Time at Portia, or Littlewood, there are a lot of options when it comes to carving your own little bit of digital land somewhere. Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition is yet another option, and while it doesn’t rise anywhere near the top, mostly due to some rather poor design choices, it is still remarkably charming in its own right and has a calming and meditative gameplay loop that did its best to keep me hooked for at least a little while.
Inspired by The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Deiland is a story about Arco, a young boy who finds himself to be the sole inhabitant of a small planet called Deiland. While the reason for his presence on the minor planet is unfolded throughout the adventure, you’ll meet a cast of characters that will visit Arco, giving him quests to tackle, and the ability to visit strange new worlds, all in an effort to discover who he is and where he’s come from. While the tease of what this could be is in fact interesting, the drawn-out nature of its pacing can take a considerably long time to even start the breadiest of bread-crumbs in your effort to unlock the answers you seek.
Arco himself is a playful youth, eager and excited to make this new planet his home. You’ll tend to your crops, mine away for resources, and bludgeon various monsters and insects that show up from time to time. While you are harvesting those crops, dodging comets that hit the planet’s surface, or building from a wealth of objects or recipes, you’ll entertain guests as they randomly show up, requiring a bit of a manual touch in parking on your planet. See their ship passing over and ignore them? Well, they will just keep going. These guests are a key component to Deiland, but it is their implementation that is both crucial to your progression and yet its worst implemented feature.
At random, Arco will make contact with one of several characters that will visit him on his tiny little planet. They often act as a storefront, but often serve to grant you new things to build and unlock a vast assortment of new tasks for you to accomplish. These visits are entirely random, and even if you’ve not completed their task, or if they simply have nothing further for you, you’ll still have them plop down their spacecraft and stick around for about a minute and then shoot off into space only to return well.. whenever they feel like it. This randomness can cause some progress to stall, and often, the task they wanted of me was given during the wrong season, or required monster parts of creatures I wouldn’t see for hours, because again, every appearance here is entirely random, enemies included.
Seasons come and go in a week, so you’re never stuck in one for too long, but the rinse and repeat of needing to get to Winter when it’s Spring, can set you back a bit of gameplay where you won’t feel like your making moves fast enough. The first character you meet, Mûn, a space-faring pilot, will often visit and have absolutely nothing for you to do, before rocketing back up, only to visit a few days later with the same “I don’t have anything for you to do” speech she’ll give you again and again. I had a mission to hand in with the Chef, a culinary alien who teaches you to make all sorts of new dishes, but I went almost an hour before he would visit again, meanwhile, Mûn had stopped by nearly 3 times since, again, with nothing for me.
This reliance on random encounters is without question, Dieland’s worst feature. I would have preferred that set characters appeared on certain days of the week, ensuring you had a fixed idea of when they would show up, instead of hoping beyond hope that the next sound of engine exhaust to flood your speakers belongs to the ship you’re waiting for. And, as I’ve mentioned, monsters share in this randomness, often putting your progression on halt until you lucked out some three hours later and you finally have the right colored insects dropping the wings you’ve been hunting endlessly for.
Farming or life-simulators often revolve around a loop. Your character wakes up, performs a series of tasks, and then turns in for the day. While Deiland never enforces any sort of bedtime for Arco, you’ll often sleep when you expend your stamina, or when you’ve earned enough experience to level up, choosing one of two stat increases that makes that loop a bit more efficient. Arco has a home to rest in, as well as enhancements to tackle a vast assortment of crafting objects, or a kitchen to prepare foods, albeit all from a menu and not from any sort of interior location. I will say that while you have a lot of customization on Deiland, your home, plots of farmable land, and a few points of interest are all in predetermined locations, making the planet feel less like yours and more of something you’re adapted to. Arco also cannot be customized himself, largely because of the in-game artwork, as there isn’t any sort of creation tool to adjust his appearance. It’s not a bad exclusion by any means, but one I figured I’d at least make a note of.
Deiland’s loop is simple and while it lacks the depth of other games in the genre, it feels more tranquil and meditative as a result. Arco has three plots of land to farm, each hosting a wealth of options per season, provided you have the seeds of what you’re needing to harvest. That said, I wish that the seeds you planted had symbols to indicate if you can actually plant them instead of the “You cannot grow that during this season” prompt when you’re trying to plant down some carrots during the off-season.
You’ll get much of what you need from your visitors as they unlock new options and restock their shops for each touchdown. You’ll plant trees to harvest wood, keeping them alive long enough to generate seeds to plant more trees and keep that process going until you have the wood you need. Rocks can be mined to collect minerals, often tossing out a few rare items as you chip away at their neverending deposits. You’ll have a hoe to farm, a hammer to crush rocks, an axe to chop wood, and a few other options as well, such as a bucket to deposit water on your crops, boosting their growth speed. There is also an interesting trick of positioning the farmed item’s icon in the moon to change what it turns into, a neat mechanic to grow huge pumpkins needed for a quest or two.
At any time, you can zoom out to see your Mario Galaxy-style planet, allowing you to spin it around and see your handiwork, adding objects and structures as you gain access to more and more objects to build. It is also this viewpoint where you’ll move the planet around to dodge incoming comets or when you need to set an area for your visitors to land. I do wish; however, that you could move the planet around via a cursor instead of the reverse controls that often had me struggling to move it around in the right way, often forgetting I am moving the planet and not the cursor. It’s not a massive problem or anything to dock marks for, but rather a preference on how that mechanic is and could have been implemented.
Apart from the harvesting of crops, and various resources, Arco can take part in combat against creatures, and a few other enemies as well. While other aspects of the game have a certain refinement to them, combat is most certainly not one of them. Using a single button, combat is clunky, especially in the use of magic, a skill that Arco learns a short bit into the game. There is just enough of a delay that leaves any confrontation to be wholly unsatisfying, and while much of your throwdowns are remarkably short and easy, they feel simply lacking and don’t feel implemented well enough at all. If we ever get a Deiland 2, combat is the mechanic I would want the most time refining.
Other small issues that remain is that some objects can get in the way of the camera if placed in certain locations during a cutscene, and I wish that fences were able to click together to place them a bit more efficiently, instead of having that fence piece just slightly off from its neighbor. I also had a lot of framerate stutters and pop-in when I started to fill up my planet more and more, especially when I planted a massive forest down, which does have to be near a water source, so apart from setting down another well or two, your options are mostly limited in location. Lastly, I had several times where the language of the game would change, with Arco speaking Spanish or something else that I couldn’t understand. This happened fairly frequently and spread to other characters in the game multiple times for the rest of my playthrough, as seen below.
Presented with a fairly mellow but largely forgettable soundtrack, there is still a charm to the visuals of Deiland: Pocket Planet that translates into some fun and engaging 3D visuals, and that of its 2D artwork, especially in the wonderfully drawn stat cards that appear as you level up. The menus themselves are well done, conveying exactly what you need to find, making it easy enough to get the information you need or browse the shops of each visitor. The planet and your craftable items work well, and the game is often bursting in color, especially during some of the season’s night and day cycles. Deiland is a good-looking game if a bit simple at times, but in some cases, less is certainly more.
Deiland is definitely an inconsistent experience when you take in the randomness of holding hostage your progression, even if the time you need to wait is largely minimal. There is certainly a charm to what developer Chibig has done here and makes me excited to see what they could do with a sequel, learning from everything they have done here, and hopefully listening to feedback from its fans and critics. While there are certainly better options for farming simulators on the Switch, Deiland still does carve its place among some of the more decent ones.
Developer - Chibig. Publisher - Chibig. Released - April 15, 2021. Available On - Nintendo Switch. Original Deiland available for PS4/PC. Rated - (E-10) Fantasy Violence. Platform Reviewed - Nintendo Switch (Portable and Docked). Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.