Ever since the explosive debut of Stardew Valley, the indie gaming space has been inundated by titles looking to recapture its formula in the hopes of grabbing even a small piece of its success. While there have been titles that have attempted to make more significant changes to what made that game work, there have also been plenty that have seemed content to coast by and feel just different enough, without managing to have anything truly new or exciting to bring to the table. Farlands may at least have an out of this world setting, complete with some unfamiliar elements and resources, but outside of that it just doesn’t feel like it has anything of notable substance to say or do that help it to differentiate itself from the competition.

Strangely enough, the areas I think the game gets the most things right are tied to its overall efficiency and quality of life aspects. Working with your tools to clear trees, rocks, and other common tasks is outright speedy, removing what can sometimes be a substantial amount of time lost to repeated swipes or more lengthy animations in other titles. If you know what you’re looking to accomplish this may be among the games that help you get things done the quickest, which is great. Another simple, but effective quality of life element it gets right is your tabbed inventory, allowing you to have far more capacity for carrying things than the average, while also getting to everything quickly as well. So there’s no doubt some care was put into respecting players’ time and keeping things moving, which is quite nice to see.

Unfortunately, with regards to helping the overall experience feel notably fresh and different, it doesn’t fare as well. Certainly flying to other planets is at least novel, but more often than not that simply feels like a change in setting, rather than an enhancement to the gameplay experience in some meaningful way. Another struggle I had was with feeling there wasn’t much up-front direction to get you going and on your way. It didn’t take long to be flush with resources, but knowing what to actually do with them was more of a question than it should have been, with most other titles in this space putting more effort into helping players get off to a faster start and a bit more fun in the process. The base elements all feel like they’re in place, it just feels like there’s something missing to take this from being a game you can simply choose to play for a while, and turn it into an experience worth getting excited about returning to. I know this spent quite some time in early access, and it doesn’t quite feel like it’s done with that phase just yet.