Welcome to Elderfield

I'm going to start out by saying that I don't normally like farming games. I find them boring and tedious. However, when this game popped on my feed, it looked very interesting. I picked it up because it had a Twin Peaks meets Call of Cthulhu feel. I knew it was a farming/Stardew Valley kind of game but I was willing to look past that. This game was so fun. It has mystery, horror, jrpg combat, and such an incredible atmosphere. I was even enjoying the farming aspect. I was having a great time and I couldn't wait to get off work and play this game...for a while. Now, I've grown tired and the game is boring to me. Now, again, I'm not into farming games. I haven't play Stardew (at the time of this review) and I tried Coral Reef and that game bored me too. The games I play the most are Persona 5 Royal, Counter-Strike, Battlefield, Octopath Traveler, L4D2, Baldur's Gate 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Ready or Not, and Space Marine 2. So, clearly, this game was not made for people like me. I get that. I get that I'm not into farming and cozy games. So, I'm sure I'm not playing the game the right way or this is really out of my field, but it's so boring now. It feels like I get off work just to get on and work. I almost fell asleep a couple times. Outside of that, here are my biggest issues: - While the mysteries are interesting at first, they get repetitive. And it mostly boils down to go here, see creepy thing, defeat it. Or go here, see creepy thing, fetch quest. Interesting at first, it's starting to turn into "I've seen this all before" but from within one game. - There are so few events and "side-quests" with the characters you're suppose to be social with. I may not have seen every thing or I haven't gotten too far into the game (33 hours at the time of this review), but I've only had 1 event that involved a few characters that felt genuine. Outside of the "nice to see you" and "give this item to someone for me" texts. There was story, depth, mystery, horror, and it was such an awesome experience. But that was it. Never brought up again. Companions went back to being slightly above Normal NPCs. This might be normal, but its repetitive and boring to talk to the same companion every week to get the same response I got last week. - Romancing companions is such a grind. It might be a bigger grind than some of the crafting I had to do. You can only give two gifts a week and they do a total of half a heart. And that's it. No talking/having a conversation with them, no ask them to hang out of being asked to hangout, no randomly find them and learning more about them. They are just slightly above normal NPCs. So, when it comes to romance, it's give the two gifts on Monday and Tuesday and then farm and mine until the next Monday and Tuesday and hope the half-a-heart goes up. And it doesn't feel like I'm doing anything. It might be because I'm romancing Celeste, but leveling up my romance with her doesn't do much besides "here's a gift that made me think you -2x String-". I've been romancing her since the start and I've gotten gifts from here twice. 33 hours in. And her dialog barely changed. I'm at 8 hearts rn. - While chance based things are fun, a LOT of this game is left up to chance. So, when I need a specific item, it's grind just to HOPE i get it. And it's discouraging when I use up all my health items to get a specific item and I have to go home empty handed several days in a row. Sorry for the rant. Again, I don't like farming/cozy games and this game was absolutely not made for someone like me. And maybe all of my complaints may be normal for farming and cozy games and the grind isn't for me. And that's why I would still recommend it. The first 25 hours were so fun and interesting for a person that finds this genre of games boring. So, if you're into these types of games, I don't doubt you'll have a great time with it. Maybe it'll get a bunch more content in the future and it'll be one of those games I check up on every couple o

It's a great game with a unique horror twist on the farming sim genre. The main thing stopping it from being a top tier game is the balance and grind as you get later into the game as well as lack of quality of life features to utilise the game's mechanics. Some suggestions: 1. GRIND - Please increase drop amounts or reduce required amounts for various recipes. - It takes a while to farm for food which you eat up fast and have to spend multiple days to replenish. If you die after consuming a bunch of top tier food it feels especially frustrating since getting top tier food takes extra long and is luck based when using rare ingredients. - An alternate suggestion would be to give player some automated system to periodically get free low tier loot, so you don't have to farm low level areas so much and can focus on progression. 2. STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES - Bestiary should be accessible during battle or at least from pause menu between battles. I think it's near impossible to remember which enemy is weak to what, unless you died to a certain boss and check bestiary after death to fight again. - If not, then at least provide feedback loop to the player when they accidentally use the right element (something along the lines of a message "its supper effective" or different coloured dmg numbers and unique sound to highlight that the element was chosen correctly.)