Faun Town – Review
Here in the West, the vast majority of video games that reach us from Asia still hail from Japan. While we don’t expect the gravity point of this to shift any time soon, we have seen a notable increase in Chinese games in recent years. Games like Genshin Impact or Biped, published by large corporations like MiHoYo and Tencent, have seen success with Western players. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that smaller Chinese developers are hoping to find an audience here as well. Case in point: 游乐坊, which has just released its farming sim Faun Town on Steam, courtesy of publisher 2P Games. Does Faun Town have what it takes to compete with the big boys?
Story
A short series of comic book panels sets up Faun Town’s story. Given that the speech bubbles in these panels are in Chinese, we wouldn’t be able to tell you what is being said, however. It’s not a real issue, as Faun Town’s premise is paper-thin, and once the game gets going, it’s easy enough to figure out what is going on. Our protagonist, the Doctor, has crash-landed his spaceship. In a twist nobody ever could’ve seen coming, he is now suffering from amnesia. Fortunately, he’s taken in by a kind old man, who decides to leave his derelict farm to our space-faring hero. It doesn’t take long for the Doctor to find his spaceship, as it is pretty much right next to the old farmhouse. The ship’s AI tasks the Doctor with repairing the ship. In order to get the parts needed, the Doctor will need to farm resources, craft materials, and trade with the local villagers. The sci-fi angle makes for a nice diversion from the standard “letter from a deceased relative” premise, but otherwise, Faun Town hits every cliché you’d expect.
Graphics
We wouldn’t be surprised if Faun Town’s pixel art visuals were simply thrown together from pre-existing assets from various sources. The game suffers from a lack of visual consistency, with some sprites looking highly detailed while others somehow look like they were made in a lower resolution. Faun Town lacks a visual identity as a result. The game also takes place across different biomes, although no real care was put into making these match their descriptions. The opening area is supposedly a jungle, but it resembles a sparse forest at best. The final nail in Faun Town’s visual coffin is that on-screen text is often cut off from the screen, with no way that we could find to fix this.
Sound
It’s probably not surprising that Faun Town’s soundscape suffers from the same shortcomings as the game’s visuals. The game’s sound effects are as generic and repetitive as it gets, and voice acting is expectedly absent. The soundtrack is lacking in variety, with a droning piano tune that keeps repeating over and over. We wouldn’t be surprised if the music was a free-to-use, license-free track rather than something specifically composed for Faun Town, as it doesn’t fit with the atmosphere of a farming sim at all.
Gameplay
In terms of gameplay, Faun Town presents itself as a jack of all trades, but a master of none. At its core, this is a classic farming sim in the same vein as Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons. Taking control of the Doctor, players can take on a myriad of mundane tasks to turn their humble farm into a thriving agricultural enterprise. On top of this tried-and-tested foundation, Faun Town then adds a Factorio-like automation system for your farm as well as a combat system that seems to have been inspired by Plants vs. Zombies. On paper, either of those additional systems has fantastic crossover potential with the farming sim genre. Unfortunately, Faun Town bites off more than it can chew and tries to cram too many ideas into a single game. The result, like the visuals, story, and audio, comes across as cobbled together rather than as something with a focused, single identity.
For what it’s worth, Faun Town at least understands the core mechanics of a farming sim. Gathering resources and processing them is simple and intuitive. You chop down trees to gather wood, then use your workbench to turn said wood into planks. You can mine for ore and refine it, harvest seeds from wild plants, and catch fish. It’s standard stuff for anyone who has ever played a farming sim. This level of accessibility is a necessity because Faun Town’s in-game explanations aren’t very good. This could be chalked up to the poor translation. Still, the game goes into too much detail about some things and fails to explain some other basic mechanics. Like many farming sims, your character only has so much energy and will need to recover this. In Faun Town, this is done by eating, but the game doesn’t explicitly tell you HOW you can eat. We found out by accident that you need to right-click on the food item of choice, but this is the kind of thing you should be told directly.
Compared to other farming sims we’ve played, Faun Town’s basic tasks are slow and tedious. This might be by design, as the idea is that you eventually automate them through robots, but this is a painstakingly time-consuming process. It doesn’t help that the game can only be played with a keyboard and doesn’t support controller inputs. Placing items and planting seeds on the grid-based map is a needlessly tedious and inaccurate process. It’s already frustrating enough when you accidentally select the wrong square when tending to your crops, but this is amplified when it comes to combat. Throughout your run, you’ll obtain so-called Xeno seeds. At night, monsters come out and will attack you on sight. You can use Xeno seeds to instantly spawn plants that will fight back against monsters. Positioning is important here, but with Faun Town’s inaccurate grid placement, this didn’t make for a very enjoyable set of mechanics. This perfectly illustrates Faun Town’s biggest issue. There are too many ideas here, and they are poorly implemented. A more focused game, that either perfects the ‘farming meets tower defense’ or a ‘turn a farm into an efficient factory’ angle, would’ve been far more enjoyable than this shallow mess.
Conclusion
To its credit, Faun Town tries to break away from the classic farming sim formula by layering additional gameplay on top. The issue here is that the game can’t decide what it wants to be. The gameplay is shallow and tedious, and the keyboard controls are iffy. It doesn’t help that there is a lack of audiovisual identity. While we appreciate the sci-fi hook of Faun Town’s premise, the story itself is held together by familiar tropes and clichés. It’s as if developer 游乐坊 simply threw things at the wall to see what would stick, but just ended up with a very messy wall.
No Comments