A copy of the game was provided by XSEED for review. Thank you!
STORY OF SEASONS: A Wonderful Life is a farming simulator RPG where you will build up your farm, take care of animals, and hopefully find love. Dropped into the town of Forgotten Valley, you will have the freedom to establish your homestead, living a carefree life to grow crops, raise animals, and make money to upgrade your facilities and create hybrid crops. But you aren’t alone either! Get to know the residents in the village, partake in events, find your soul-mate, and watch as your family grows throughout the game. It’s time to dive in and start your new life!
As a fan of the original Harvest Moon games, I was super excited to see this one! STORY OF SEASONS: A Wonderful Life is a remake of the 2003 game of the same name (Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life). In this version though, we not only have updated visuals, but new animals, events, marriage candidates, and quality of life improvements, like being able to spam a button to pickup all similar crops instead of having to go to each one. They have also added in much more freedom, allowing you full creative freedom to create your character the way you want and bringing in features like same-sex marriage and more!
Playing through this game brought me back to the good ol’ GameCube days, giving me the chance to replay one of the couple titles that defined the console for me. Thankfully, this is the best way to do that! It is similar to other farming simulator games, like Stardew Valley, but it has its own charm to it that I really only felt with Harvest Moon games. The gameplay loop of farming, cultivating, taking care of animals, and getting invested in the village is wonderful, but I adore how the game spans across years and years, allowing me to not only start a family, but watch the kids grow up.
There is no rushing around with this game, no quests or missions, just taking your time to grow, relax, and enjoy the world. There are some aspects that hasn’t done as well with age, like some of the festivals and how they are handled, and some dialog options with the other residents may feel a bit limited at times, but this is still a worthwhile farming simulator to dive into. With a couple tweaks, we can also really maximize our performance on the Steam Deck.
STORY OF SEASONS: A Wonderful Life – Steam Deck Performance
Right out of the box, STORY OF SEASONS: A Wonderful Life runs really well, hitting 60 FPS while sticking below a 16W drain. But, with this being a remake of a game from 2003, I felt this is draining a bit too much battery. Luckily, fixing this is quite simple with a TDP limit of 7 and GPU Clock Speed frequency of 1000, we can get a buttery smooth 60 with an average 12W – 13W drain. There might be some light stuttering here and there when looking in certain directions, but it didn’t happen often.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t support 16:10 resolutions though, so you will have black bars at the top and bottom, but there is controller support and cloud saves, so you will be able to carry your game over to other devices!
Conclusion
STORY OF SEASONS: A Wonderful Life is a great remake of an old classic that improves upon it while retaining what made the original so great. With some new events, animals, and more freedom, this is the definitive version of the classic Harvest Moon game from 2003. There are still a few rough edges here and there, but for the most part, I enjoyed diving back into the farming simulator, though part of that could be my nostalgia. Regardless, it does run well on the Steam Deck, which is fantastic, and since the tweaks I propose are optional, this is still a best on deck game!
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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