Different elevations give the game more dimension, but there are always clear paths to where you need to go, with lots of opportunities to catch critters, chop down trees or fish along the way. Fae Farm’s layout hits the perfect sweet spot for me, though. Stardew Valley’s map, on the other hand, feels a little too spread out I’d often get lost trying to find someone, or random obstacles would block a clear path to where I wanted to go. In Wylde Flowers, the map is very uncomplicated but almost to a fault in that it ends up feeling a little flat and eventually makes visiting non-player characters (NPCs) feel tedious. The main town (I named mine Cozinia) has a layout that’s somewhere between the maps in Wylde Flowers and Stardew Valley.

I’m also notoriously directionally challenged in real life and in video games (open-world games like Elden Ring or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom quite frankly scare me), but I found the Fae Farm map to be easily navigable very early on. I won’t spoil how many houses you’ll have by the end of the main story, but even having more than one is an exciting development for this kind of game. You’ll even unlock new homesteads in unexpected areas. For me, it took about 55 hours of gameplay and finishing the eight-chapter main story to unlock a fully traversable map. Whenever I thought I had fully opened up the map, somewhere new would become available, which kept the game feeling fresh before it even began to feel stale. But as you progress in the main story, you’re able to unlock areas that were previously blocked off and even explore an entirely different realm. When you first arrive in Azoria, it may feel like a pretty standard village with a market, a tavern, a mine, some spooky woods and, of course, your homestead.

Fae Farm instal the new for windows