While simplicity can often be an excellent selling point for indie games, there’s still a delicate balance that must be hit upon to make it work. In the case of titles that manage to find the sweet spot, where you’re able to reduce some of a genre’s typical burdens but still be satisfying, it can be very exciting, but when you cut too much of the experience what you’re left with can feel threadbare. Unfortunately, while it has good intentions, that’s the trap I see Sugardew Island falling into.

I suppose its firm embrace of truly being a more dedicated farming sim, rather than trying to pepper in a variety of other activities as well, could work out somehow. To the developer’s credit, in order to try to fill the void of those other side jobs missing, they’ve added a shop managing component where the idea is that by interacting with the townspeople you may somehow be more satisfied. The problem is, given how dull and often time-consuming that activity can be (since you’ll need to wait until your stock has been exhausted), it really fails to bring any new positives to the mix. Ultimately, the problem is that there’s just too little control you have over the prices of items, and while you may need to try to convince one of your customers that the item they have is worth it, you barely interact with anyone at all.

That then makes the experience hinge on the depth and the quality of the farming itself, and unfortunately again there’s just not enough here to get excited about, and for the most part even what’s in place can feel unrefined. The accuracy when you’re trying to perform your tasks is generally pretty poor and can feel haphazard at times, making what should be pretty routine tasks just a little more painful than normal. The collective feeling from all of this just ends up being that the game’s ambitions were too low for it to meaningfully compete in what’s become quite a crowded field, and even for the elements it does have they’ve typically been implemented better by the competition.