Fae Farm is an upcoming farm sim RPG with magic that aims to sprinkle its unique brand of fairy dust onto the cozy game genre. With many games encompassing the beloved cozy genre of life sims, farm sims, and more, many might wonder how Fae Farm plans to stand out and offer something different to fans.
Although Fae Farm has Stardew Valley vibes and some parallels with games like Story of Seasons, it looks to include several features that could make it something special. Game ZXC recently had the opportunity to see a hands-off demo with Phoenix Labs Game Director Isaac Epp, showing more about how Fae Farm's crafting stations work alongside its coziness system, its character customizer, and more. Game ZXC also spoke with Epp about how Fae Farm's co-op multiplayer works, its cozy combat, and how Fae Farm sits into the popular farm sim genre. Epp also spoke more about Fae Farm's romance options, the use of magic, and much, much more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Can you explain more about how upgrading tools works? So in games like Story of Seasons, there are levels like copper and gold. How does it work in Fae Farm?
A: I would say there's some conceptual overlap. You do start with really basic tools, and then through the minerals and other ingredients that you're finding in the world as you're progressing and getting more access to more in the game, you can go to the blacksmith Cinder. She helps upgrade your tools. And when you upgrade your tools, it also gets announced and helps all the other players too. So, there's just kind of good value out of that.
Every other level unlocks another level of magic for that tool, which is where they really start getting valuable because obviously, they're more efficient. You can mine and shop and do things like that more efficiently with better tools. But because of the access to the magical abilities that you get with each of those tools, that's where you really start getting your kind of escape velocity for getting better resources more quickly over time.
Q: You said magic can make things more effective and more efficient. How might magic help with other activity activities like fishing, cooking, or crafting?
A: Yeah, it's sort of a mix. Magic manifests in a few key ways throughout the game. One is through the tool upgrades like we were talking about. Another is, once you get the staff pretty early in the game, you're unlocking spells as you progress. And each of those spells has, you know, there's combat utility, there's also an overworld functional utility. Some of them are also helpful around the homestead.
The other kind of main area where there's a lot of magic is in the potions. There are dozens of potions in the game. They also kind of influence lots of different levels, whether it's giving you buffs on activities, or it's completely transforming that action in combat. For example, there are a bunch of spells where you could have Chain Lightning and turn yourself invisible and not have any enemies fighting.
The other area is through some of the food that you'll be crafting. They are also enhancing your ability to interact and do all the various activities in the world, and the coziness system which kind of underpins some of your ability to scale up those interactions over time.
Q: You mentioned the whirlwind spell as a quality-of-life feature for making crops grow more efficiently. Could you explain a bit more about how magic helps farming and growing crops?
A: Yeah, so with one of the combos you saw in the demo, there was a tool where the water can had been upgraded. There was access to the Water Bloop spell, which made it so that you could water a lot of crops at once. Once those crops were ready to harvest, rather than having to manually press over and over again to keep yanking corn out of the ground, you stand next to a couple of different fields of crops and pull out your Vortex spell, and it'll harvest all of them in one go. You get a really quick way of burning through that, and you're getting efficiency at the cost of using mana.
The Vortex spell in particular is also useful in combat. It's like a big AoE and knockback. So, if you're getting swarmed by enemies at a dungeon, you can just cast that and it's pretty helpful. I think you could also use it to pick up grass and stuff in the world too. It's a good utility spell.
Q: For those players who are maybe not so keen on combat, can they use things like potions to hide from enemies and adjust their gameplay preferences in that way?
A: Absolutely. We love games like this, we play them all, we love them, and we’ve sunk hundreds and hundreds of hours into them. But as is true with any game, there were little parts of it that were like, if we did this, we would do it a little bit differently. And so, we try to find little quality-of-life improvements that we would do over time.
We also know that for some people, there are just some activities in the game that they like and some that they may not like. For your example of combat, if someone wants to progress through the game and they want to upgrade their tools and stuff, but they don't want to have to keep banging on the Jumbles, they can just craft some Gone potions, which are our invisibility potions. And they can just run through those dungeons and just mine and never have to engage.
What we would consider our bosses for the dungeons, they're not combat experiences - they're sort of more narrative, and you actually are cooking them really elaborate meals. Once you give them what they needed to give them the energy so that they can fix whatever problem was in the world, they get really sleepy, and they go into a food coma - it's really cute.
Q: You mentioned there are 6 NPCs that players can romance. How inclusive is Fae Farm with romance and what kinds of choices do players have? Some games make players get married – what kind of options do players have with romance?
A: I'm delighted to say that all the NPCs in the game—regardless of if they are men, women, or non-binary—they are all interested in players, irrespective of what they have assigned to their avatar from the character creator. We sort of think of all of our NPCs are player-sexual—their orientation is player. And so, they're always interested. If the player is interested in them back then great, they can go help each other out, learn more about each other, and go on dates. If they decide, once you hit your max relationship that you want to get married to one of them, you can - you certainly don't have to.
You can date any or all of them that you want, and that's true during multiplayer as well. There are some fun things that happen where if two people are interested, then it's first come, first served. You better go on those dates and get those gifts and try to grind up that relationship if you're the one that wants to pop the question because an NPC per save can only be married to one player at a time. Just because fictionally that's what makes sense.
And there's also a really dishy thing that can happen with weddings. So, since you can date all these NPCs, you might have really high relationship scores with all the romanceable NPCs. Well, when you have your wedding, a lot of that crowd is populated by your highest relationships in the game. And so, all of those people you dated are right in the front rows, staring at you while you're getting married, which is great [laughs].
Q: What do you think Fae Farm adds to the cozy farm sim genre, compared to popular titles like Stardew Valley?
A: I would say one of them is we've tried to just really stay true to the things that we know people have come to love and expect. There's that as a foundation. And then on top of that, working with Katie [Fae Farm Creative Director Katie De Sousa] and the entire art team, we have this incredibly beautiful world that we think is special and really shines and just delivers on a level of craft that maybe hasn't been seen in the genre where you can go to any corner of the world, rock or plant. You can see how much care and effort and love went into it from those developers.
In addition to that, as fans of the genre, we've really tried to find opportunities to get little quality-of-life improvements just across the board. Things like your basic tools, not having to fiddle through menus to just take care of things around the homestead, like you just want to be able to press a button and do it. And once you feel it this way, you kind of wish it had always been done this way.
For some things, we've done an inventory where there's a storage shed and one thing you're doing on the homestead will just automatically pull from the shed, so you don't have to keep running back to throw in your backpack. There are just lots of things like that, that we think overall create a kind of next-level UX for this kind of cozy game. That's another level where I think it's vastly improved. We also have co-op multiplayer, which is not something that is really standard in the genre.
Q: You showed me a bit of character customization. Is it possible for players to customize their fairy wings and if so, how does that work?
A: Oh yeah, there are a bunch of fairy wings. There's a very cool, magical character in the game that you interact with to get those. And yeah, you can get your own special wings so that you can make sure that you look the way you want to look. As soon as you get access to those wings, there is a big functional boost that happens in the game. Once you have wings, you double jump. And since our world is set up kind of like a big playground, as soon as you can double jump, suddenly you're like, 'oh my God, where can I go now?' You start retreading everything in the world with a double jump, and it's great.
So again, that's another example of how customization is purposeful. It's not just for show and decoration.
A: Yeah. I think another example there too is just feeling like you can and should go places, you can just jump in the water, right? I mean, that's another one where maybe not every game works that way, but we thought it should because it felt like if I want to jump in the water, cross the river, or swim around the ocean, it's totally fine.
Q: Could you tell me a little bit more about the crafting stations? You showed me the gem polisher, and I saw things like a loom. How did those things mix with magic, and how did they work?
A: A lot of those stations are straight-up magic in and of themselves, and there's no mundane version of that in the world. All of our stations have, whether it's even in their just animations and stuff, everything is just a little bit enhanced with magic. We just like things to sparkle, so there's a lot of that too.
But the interplay of the stations is interesting because if you think of an example of a couple of stations, you might have seen one and not the other. When you're collecting your critters, there are different conservatories that you put them into based on the type of critter that it is. And when you pop them in there, they will in turn start generating resources for you like dust from the butterflies or little bits of goop that come from the frogs.
All of those ingredients can then be used in some of the more magical crafting stations, like the cauldron where if you do need some of these cool potions like invisibility or there's another one that I think is really fun, which is called the Jar of Sadness potion. It puts a rain cloud over your head for a certain amount of time, which is both really cute, but also you could just walk around your crop. That's where you can see a little bit of how the magic fuels through there.
Q: Could you talk a bit more about what kinds of magical creatures players might find as they explore? You mentioned Azoria is more rural, and the Fae Realm is maybe more magical. Is it the more you explore, the more magical creatures you're probably going to find, catch, or interact with?
A: Yeah. I think you really pegged it well because you start the game and you very quickly start getting little hints of more magic, and then you start getting access to even more and seeing more magical things. As you explore more of the world, get access to more of the world, and get more things unlocked for you, the creatures, the critters, the Jumbles, the things that you're fighting, and the areas of the world itself are all just a little bit more magical.
Q: How might Fae farm explore or experiment with traditional features of Fae folktales and lore, like Will-o-the-Wisps? I see you've got Sprites that players can come across, like the Gloom Shade or the Sun Sprite you collected.
A: I would say we are inspired by the traditional folklore. I mean, if we're being honest, a lot of that stuff is really dark and our game is not. We made this game, largely because it's a reaction to what we were feeling in the world, right? It was a really dark, scary place. And suddenly, things were not feeling very well or feeling very safe. This game exists to be the opposite of that, right?
We wanted to make a cozy space where people can feel safe, have adventures, and be inclusive to our friends and family. We know that we could hand this game to any of those people, they're going to have a good time, they're going to feel psychologically safe, and they're going to feel welcome. If we stick to some of those traditional fae stories, it might start making it feel like that grim, dark place that we were all trying to escape from. So, we've taken a lot of those ideas, and we've twisted them to make them feel appropriate in our cute world.
Q: Is there anything else that you wanted to add today?
A: It's difficult to say because it's a big game. There are a lot of systems, a lot of content, so it's hard for me to know what to harp on more rather than just showing you these little slices that we've done. But I do hope and expect that when we launch, players are going to start playing this game, and they're going to have the great fun adventure together that we have had when we play together. And I can’t wait.
[END]
Fae Farm launches September 8 for PC and Switch.