There was a moment, several years ago, when it seemed farming life simulator RPGs had fully run their course. After the success of Stardew Valley, studios kicked into gear and started producing Stardew-alikes as quickly as they could, with varying degrees of success and artistic integrity. Companies pushed these games out to the general JRPG market with fervor, though much of the general JRPG market didn’t seem all that interested. And then… it sort of just stopped. There were still plenty of farming life sims, of course, but they seemed much more focused toward the cozy community. And I thought that was where it would stay. But now we’re entering a new era for the genre, and it comes to us via a marriage I never would have imagined. Cozy horror is the general term I hear thrown around between people in the know, and there could be no better description for it, despite being an oxymoron on its face. After all, is there anything comfortable about being scared?
Village in the Shade comes to us from Nippon Ichi Software, the developers behind the Disgaea series and, more pertinently to this review, the Yomawari games. Yomawari as a series uses cutesy, hand-drawn art and high, three-quarters perspectives to tell spooky, even downright scary stories. But those stories and those games were always straight horror exploration. Village in the Shade marks the introduction of a new subgenre to the mix, with your character maintaining a farm and a social life amidst what I think is best described as a modern day Japanese folk horror setting.
Let’s talk about the story first of all, because in my mind, story is what sets games like Village in the Shade apart from other farming life sim games.
Story
The game begins in classic horror fashion, with a seemingly idyllic scene suddenly taking a horrific turn. The moment the title screen faded in over the disturbing imagery, I knew I was in for something pretty special. The introduction perfectly sets the tone for what’s to come.
You control Ame, a child with amnesia who finds their way to the village of Kagatsu, a beautiful community in the mountains of Japan. It’s a tiny community, and one that doesn’t have time for outsiders, but the villagers make an exception in your case. It could be that they feel sympathy for the young, confused child found wandering in the forest alone, or it could be that they have ulterior motives. In fact, the townspeople are so varied in personalities and motivations that I think it’s safe to say that both apply. The characters you encounter, from the stern, no-nonsense town leader Rin to the energetic and socially awkward Komako to the brash and sarcastic carpenter Kisuke, all make Kagatsu feel like a real place. You know people like this. And because the characters are so varied, it’s entirely possible and even likely that they each have different motivations for helping Ame out.
Ame’s life in Kagatsu is anything but normal. Despite being a child – yes, a literal child – Ame is immediately set up in an abandoned farmhouse and put to work tilling the land. This is because there are no free rides in Kagatsu, and good things don’t come without sacrifice. And sometimes, that sacrifice is literal.
The greatest thing about the horror in Village in the Shade is how it comes about slowly. After the eerie and tragic opening, the game’s initial hours seem relatively normal, assuming you can swallow the “child living alone and running a farm singlehandedly” aspect of things. But slowly, bits of the uncanny start creeping in. First it’s the list of rules, eight rules that all villagers are expected to follow or face punishment. Don’t go out at night. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t try and find anything that is lost. Weird, even a little creepy, but okay, fine. They’re a super insulated rural community, the rules are probably there to keep everyone safe. Then it’s the compulsory sacrifice. Bring something of value to the village well and throw it down as a sign of gratitude to the local gods. Again, weird, but it’s a local tradition, and it seems like not that big of a deal, at least until they cover Ame’s eyes and drop a live goat down the well. Then it’s the rooting fee. Not unreasonable for a town to levy taxes of a sort, but those who can’t pay are able to make up the deficit by giving blood. I mean, at that point, we’re entering a whole new level of creepy.
The first rule of the village, the one that forbids going outdoors after 11 p.m., is put in place for a reason, a reason that Ame discovers after living in the village for a couple of weeks. Inhuman creatures roam around Kagatsu and the surrounding area at night, and if Ame’s attacked, there’s very little recourse. A tiny kid doesn’t stand much of a chance against gods, after all.
Learning the secrets of the town and how deeply each of the villagers is involved in that mystery is what truly sets Village in the Shade apart from games like it. When I say “games like it,” understand I mean farming life sims. Stardew Valley reinvigorated the genre that had been pioneered by Harvest Moon and later Story of Seasons, but too many games that followed Stardew’s model followed it too closely. There isn’t much of a story in Stardew Valley. There are a lot of interesting characters, and their individual lives tell small, fun stories, but plot isn’t the point. Village in the Shade is a story-first experience. And the story it tells is gripping from start to finish. The mystery surrounding the village and the demons that plague it played out in a way that I genuinely didn’t see coming, and I loved seeing my theories proved wrong, and even occasionally proved right. It’s an expertly told story that maintains tension throughout all its major story sequences.
But at times, the pacing sucks some of that tension away. This is still a farming life sim. Each day is filled with chores and responsibilities. Those crops aren’t going to grow themselves, and if you want to get in good with the villagers you need to help them out with various tasks. Don’t be surprised if the first couple of weeks of in-game time take half a dozen hours to get through. Between all the tutorials and the frontloaded story setup, it may feel like things are moving at a snail’s pace. But even after the tutorials cease and life starts progressing at a normal speed, you might still find that pace to be a bit slower than you prefer. Particularly for someone like me, who finds themselves hooked by the story, you’re going to want to find out what happens next. In order to get those answers, though, you’re going to have to feed your sheep and water your tomatoes.
Technically, though, it is possible to forego a lot of the grind. Nothing stops Ame from hitting the hay at 10:00 a.m. every morning if you want to, allowing you to advance to the next day and see the next part of the story. That feels like doing a bit of a disservice to the game, though, which is why I wish there was more of a connection between the farming and the rest. Rushing through chores to get to the fun stuff is what I do in my real life; here, I would have liked to see the story make its way into the farming. This does seem to be a common issue for story-first farming life sims, and while Village in the Shade balances things reasonably well, all things considered, I did feel a constant tension between the gameplay and the story, and not a fully pleasant tension.
In fact, the gameplay and story are in such tension with one another that you can almost ignore the gameplay entirely. There are a handful of times throught the plot that your progress is gated by the need to upgrade a particular piece of equipment, for example, but not very often. It’s possible to forego the gameplay, which feels like a missed opportunity in some ways. I wish the story had been tied more tightly to it.
Speaking of gameplay, though, let’s get into that next.
Gameplay
At its most basic level, the gameplay in Village in the Shade is everything you would expect from a farming life sim. You clear the fields of rocks and weeds and other debris, you till the land, you plant seeds, water them daily, and in a few in-game days you have a harvest of crops. You can build chicken coops and barns and raise livestock, selling eggs and milk and wool. You can plant an orchard of trees and have a steady harvest of fruit. All the basic farming elements are here and they’re well represented, though without a ton of innovation to differentiate this gameplay from the gameplay you’ve seen in other titles. Your farm equipment is all upgradable with the goal of making your daily chores less of a chore to complete, and your facilities can be expanded as well, so long as you have enough money and raw materials. You’re never going to be in want of enough wood or stone, since Kagatsu Village is surrounded by forests and mountains. It’s just a matter of taking the time out of your day to go and gather it. Because this is a 2D game controlled by an analog joystick, you’ll sometimes run into trouble with aiming yourself in the proper direction. If you’re not super particular about the way your fields are tilled, then the occasional misdirected hoeing won’t bother you too much; but if you’re me, it will drive you insane. I just want even rows of corn, guys. The game does let you cancel out of an action before you release the button, but it requires claw-gripping the controller in order to hit cancel.
You have a stamina meter that determines how much work you’re able to do. Unlike in some other games, running out of stamina doesn’t mean passing out and losing the rest of the day; you literally just won’t be able to perform any tasks, though you can still run around and interact with the villagers. Stamina can be restored by eating, so keeping a bunch of snacks on you at all times is a great way to power through when you have a lot of work to get done. You also have a health meter, separate from stamina, and that comes into play in a couple of ways.
The first and least dire of ways is in the mines. As you chisel your way through the insides of the mountain, you’ll come across bats, spiders, rats, and other nasty things that want to take a bite out of you. If they take enough bites, you take a dirt nap. It’s literally just a nap, though, you’ll wake up the next day just fine, though in a state of low health. Every ten levels down, you can take a minecart back to the entrance, and that marks a new starting point, so you don’t have to keep trekking through the same levels every time you want to advance.
The second and more unique way that health comes into play is in the nighttime sequences. In most farming life sims, nighttime is a no-man’s land. If you’re not in bed by a certain time, you pass out in the field and wake up in the infirmary or something like that. That’s not the case in Village in the Shade. Here, from time to time, you’ll be woken up in the middle of the night by pounding at your door. Whether you choose to answer it or not is up to you, but if you do, you’ll enter into a haunting. The ghost or demon or god you face varies randomly, though there are a few key items you can offer at your personal shrine to ensure you get a particular encounter if you want. Roaming the streets of Kagatsu at night – in strict violation of rule #1, do not go outside after 11p.m. – can be a genuinely unsettling experience. Many ghosts won’t be visible until your flashlight beam passes over them, meaning it’s possible to turn a blind corner and run into a terrifying giant face or shadow person. Like I said, you can easily skip the nighttime sequences by just jumping back into bed, so what’s the benefit of doing them? Well, there are a few, and how much you engage with them will depend on how interested you are in developing your character. In order to upgrade certain abilities and access certain equipment, you have to donate magatama at a nearby shrine. Outside of a small handful of instances, the only way to get magatama is by wandering around at night. You’ll see them sparkling on the ground when your flashlight hits them. Besides upgrades, discovering the unique way of stopping each haunting will reward you with some sort of special item. These are often decorative, nothing extraordinary, but it does add to the satisfaction of figuring out each god’s secret weakness. The sheer variety of different hauntings makes each night compelling, and even when you start seeing repeats, it’s fun to try and figure out how to conquer them before 5 a.m. rolls around.
There are other benefits to roaming around at night, including one that should be top of your priority list if you enjoy farming and mining. Each season, a fox will appear on the map at night and will guide you to a secret shrine. At that shrine, you must offer certain items, like crops or flowers or fish. Doing so will get you rewards. One reward you’ll always receive is a seasonal scarecrow. In this game, scarecrows don’t frighten off birds so they don’t eat your crops. Instead, they function as life extenders for a particular plot of crops. Like most farming life sims, different crops can only grow in certain seasons. Placing, for example, an autumn scarecrow in a field of autumn crops will allow you to continue growing those crops through winter. The biggest reward for completing the fox’s requests, though, is the permanent extension to your stamina meter. Simply being able to do more throughout the day without having to load up on food makes the gameplay so much smoother, so knocking out the fox’s shrine as early as possible each season should be a given.
Besides all the farm life and hauntings, you have a town full of people to interact with. Like I said before, these are all unique characters with very distinct personalities, and honestly I fell in love with almost all of them. Their dialog changes often, and they each have their own routines and schedules they keep to. You can give them gifts to increase your relationship with each of them, and doing so rewards you with unique scenes from time to time. The characters are one of the game’s strongest points. You’re a silent protagonist, so you can’t contribute much to the life of the town, but their relationships with each other are so much fun to watch develop. Periodically they’ll post requests on the town bulletin board, though these are of the boring “bring me 5 stones” sort, and the reward seems to always be 1,000 yen, so there isn’t a ton of incentive to engage with that. I wish spending time with townspeople had more of a tie-in to the gameplay, but I found it pretty rewarding on its own.
There’s a lot more in the fine details of the gameplay, some of which I didn’t mess around much with. Cooking, for example. You can learn recipes from your friends around town, and eating the same meal three times at the local restaurant will allow you to make that recipe yourself at home. I cooked a couple of times, but just didn’t feel particularly drawn to it. It never felt like it contributed in a meaningful way to the gameplay loop. Sure, some of the townspeople’s favorite gifts are certain food items, so if you’re trying to max out your relationship with certain characters, the stomach is the fastest way to their hearts, but I mostly gave it a pass. You can fish at certain designated spots, as well, like you might expect, and the fishing mini game is simple but not super engaging.
Besides all of this stuff, which you probably came in expecting to see, there’s one element I’m almost hesitant to mention, simply because it was such a pleasant surprise when I encountered it the first time. Skip ahead a bit if you want to avoid knowing it, though I won’t be spoiling anything really. There are some almost Zelda-like boss battles in this game, actually? It’s odd. Combat isn’t really a part of the gameplay; you can whack animals in the mines so they can’t kill you, and you can hunt with a bow and the appropriate hunting licenses to take down boar and bears and foxes, among other things, but a handful of times throughout the game you find yourself pitted against some evil monstrosity or another and you have to defeat it in open combat. Well, open combat maybe isn’t totally accurate. You’ll have to avoid enemy attacks and strike back at the right moments, and at times you’ll even need to attack certain elements in the environment instead of the enemy itself. I was honestly shocked at how well these sequences played. Given that the game isn’t set up as an action RPG at all, the fact that these boss fights were as enjoyable as they were – and intense – was a really cool treat to uncover.
Presentation
This is a beautiful game. The entire map is one big gorgeous hand-painted masterpiece, and exploring and noticing the finer details of the environment is a genuinely good time. It maintains that cutesy, super-deformed art style from the Yomawari series, and it has some surprisingly detailed animations for its sprite characters. I really want to know more about how this artwork was created. It’s such a stunning map, or actually four maps considering changes made for each season of the year. It captures the feeling of rural Japan so incredibly well. I admittedly only have limited experience with rural Japan personally. I stayed in a small town in the mountains there last year, and I did have to make my way through a creepy cemetery and shrine on a rainy night to get to my onsen, so from my perspective, they really nailed the aesthetic.
The graphics are accompanied by lovely, sparsely composed music. Pianos and strings lead the ensemble, and it suits the idyllic tone of the daytime sequences really well. There are a few tracks per day, depending on the time, and the melodies change with the season as well. At night, it’s a much more atmospheric experience, and music composition takes the bench to be replaced with chilling sound design. The echo of footsteps, the grotesque squelching of some unholy creature, the sound of a baby crying off in the distance, there are a ton of expertly crafted sounds that make the hauntings memorable.
Don’t be fooled by your first glance at this game. If you’re not looking closely at the artwork, you might think this is a budget title. But this is a remarkable work of art in many ways.
Nitpicks
On the whole, Village in the Shade is a fantastic marriage of cozy gameplay and folk horror storytelling. I’ve mentioned a few issues that keep this from perfection, and here are a few more.
Fast travel is relegated only to returning to your home. I understand why that might be, given that time management is such an important part of the gameplay loop, and being able to teleport all around the map might lessen that aspect. But it’s a big map, and knowing that you’ve got to run from one corner to another can be a drag. I’d even be okay with the game’s clock advancing to the point that it WOULD be if I ran there, just so long as it saved me the trip on occasion.
Speaking of time management, by the end of my experience I had my farm life running like a well-oiled machine. Through upgrades and organization, I could finish my chores super quickly each morning, which means I frequently found myself with several real-life minutes to kill before shops would open and characters would become available. Being able to jump forward a bit would have been a nice little touch to help avoid that downtime. I mean, sure, I could have used that extra time to even further maximize my efficiency, but then doesn’t that just exacerbate the issue?
Finally, there are a handful of special events throughout the year, town festivals where everyone gathers. There isn’t much to do at these, in fact they feel a bit like a late addition done out of necessary adherence to the form more than for any real gameplay or story reason. But these events don’t really signpost themselves all that well. You get a calendar you can put up on your wall, but you’re responsible for keeping track of dates, and if you miss an event, you miss it. I would have liked a bit more guidance on some of these, particularly the regular assessments. Each season you’re allowed to choose one aspect of your farm life to be assessed. I assumed that meant someone would come to my farm and grade me on my performance. What it actually meant is that I need to bring my best example of whatever I’m being judged on – crops, for example – to the town square and have it judged there. I don’t recall seeing any information about that at all. Entirely possible I missed it, but being able to dig up information you missed easily is important, and a handful of times throughout the game I felt that was lacking.
Conclusion
Village in the Shade expertly combines two disparate genres in a way that feels faithful to both. For anyone who loves farming life sims but hates horror, the game offers Village in the Sunshine mode, which is the farming without the harming, so to speak. Sorry. It cuts out all the horror elements and lets you just live your perfect rural Japanese farm life fantasy. But if you can stomach the uneasiness that comes from being surrounded by kind people who seem to be harboring secrets, the terror of late-night knocks at your door, and the uncanny feeling that something is following you through the trees as you make your way home at night, this game will provide you with a haunting story and an addictive gameplay loop. It’s held back by many of the same issues that plague other games in the farming life sim genre – the repetitive nature of the tasks, the frustrations of time management – but for many, those issues are a feature, not a bug. This is very much a farming sim with a super compelling story grafted onto it. If you’re already a farming sim lover, this provides you with incentive by promising you all that you love and more. If you hate farming sims, though, it may be difficult to slog through the chores to get to the good stuff. Still, unless you’re firmly anti-farming sim, I recommend Village in the Shade very highly. It’s one of the coolest games I’ve played this year.