Super Farming Boy

With the ten-year anniversary of Stardew Valley’s release on the horizon next year, I have been thinking on the monumental shift in indie games, and particularly farming sims, that have sprouted up since. It’s a crowded field. Nine years on, they’ve taken every seemingly possible permutation. For me, the “farming sim” as we knew it doesn’t really exist in the same way, but rather we’ve reached a moment of general “management sims” that have farming mechanics in the race to stand out against others.

Super Farming Boy, the first major game from Argentinian Lemonchili Games, is a Saturday morning cartoon farming sim. Eh, a match-3 farming sim. An animated anti-capitalist agricultural exploitation mill. You know, I couldn’t figure out a neat one-liner description of the game, but the folks at Lemonchili did create something entirely unique that is couched within the farming sim genre tag. While it took an hour or two to get my bearings, it proved to be one of the more engaging gameplay loops I’ve experienced in a while, but less for its farming.

The first few in-game days were a bit of a mess. Not really for what the game is or even how it’s designed necessarily, but Super Farming Boy is the first farming sim I’ve played that asked me to meet it on its terms, forcing me to set aside years and dozens of farming sim experiences I have under my belt. In most games of the genre, there’s the expectation that they’ll be light-hearted, idealistic, and slower-paced. For many folks, the repetition of cleaning up and organising your farm into tidy rows of crops you individually water daily is relaxing. In Super Farming Boy, it’s all you can do to keep the chaos controlled.

The game starts off with a bang. Nebulous villain Korpo, a tornado-shaped, greedy, demon-like capitalist, shows up within ten minutes of the tutorial. You, Super, had been learning the ropes of your mother’s farm the day he arrives. Korpo sucks in all the crops off their tiles and then unceremoniously devours your mom in a single bite. To pile on the troubles, he forces Super into a contract in which he is forced to work his mother’s farm in order to pay off an enormous debt. 

With the farm left in shambles, you’re off to work. Like most farming sims, you’ve got few skills and a small stamina bar. I set about tidying things up, getting plots in order and getting to know the locals, like I had done countless times before.

But that’s not really how this one works. Yes, you need to buy seeds, and yes, you have to get them in the ground, watered, etc. But the town is full of aimless NPCs, and vendors are one-dimensional. I assume they’ll get much more detail as the game progresses in early access, but for now, Super Farming Boy is a streamlined experience. In my time with the game, I really only went into town to upgrade buildings, grab rewards for bounty-like quests and buy goods. 

It’s you versus the farm. Button inputs are gorgeously simplified. Tools automatically swap depending on what you’re doing. Watering, harvesting, cutting weeds, breaking stones – whatever the case, it’s a single input. When tilling, you hold down one button and then use the same interact button. I loved this because it made it near impossible to damage your crops unless you wanted to uproot a seed. You don’t fiddle with any hotbars or inventories. Crops bound along beside you, and you just pick them up to plant them. 

Everything is automated or unlimited. As Super moves around, he vacuums up everything within a radius, and even then, you can buy helpers to scoop up resources or break rocks for you. 

Even movement feels juiced up. You can walk everywhere, but where there would normally be a sprint button, you can fly. There was hardly a reason to not zip around. But at the same time, I needed optimisation. The clutter on your farm outpaces your ability to keep it orderly, and the streamlined mobility does not shortcut the tasks at hand.

You just cannot tackle the farm in the traditional way. Super Farming Boy’s chief unique characteristic is the combos. I had to rewire my farming sim brain to account for how crops popped upon harvesting them. That’s right, it’s about the pop of the crop, not the yield of the field. Rather than buying crops based on net revenue, you have to buy crops based on their pop pattern. The key to Super Farming Boy is to master chain reactions of popping. For example, when you pull an ear of corn, one of the first crops you’ll get in spring, it will pop one square to the right. This means that if another ripened crop is planted on the tile where the corn pops, then it will also pop and activate its own pop pattern. 

Chaining harvesting combos is the answer to mostly everything in the game. To clear your farm, you’ve got to chain a combo. Any tile that gets popped, even if it has a weed, stone, stump, etc., will take damage as if you had gone and hit it with a tool. Pests will come to your farm, and the only way to damage them is to pop ‘em. Each season has its own unique currency, which is best gathered by destroying season-centric resource tiles. Pop ‘em. The final part of the day cycle, appropriately named “Dead night”, is when ghouls spawn and slowly swarm your farm. If you need to keep working into the dead of night, you already know it; pop the ghosts. 

I had finally shifted my thinking to this game design after the first season, which correlated with me getting enormous amounts of money. While Spring was dire, Volcanic, the following season, is where my fortunes took a turn for the better. I developed an intuitive sense of what crops would chain combos more easily, how to clear out my farm more quickly, and how to inch toward the in-game goal of hitting a 100x combo. 

This objective felt optional, but no, it’s required. The key is to activate your super meter through farming combos and the uncommon drop of a super energy crystal from cracking open stones. When that meter hits the fill line, the screen is overtaken by a loud rainbow boogie, and crops will grow immediately and pop automatically. After tinkering a bit, getting 100x combos becomes straightforward with strategically planted regrowing crops, and they’ll spawn a critical currency for tool and building upgrades. 

The focus on combos is the birthplace of the game’s speed and chaos. Unlike most farming sims, Super Farming Boy has 15-day seasons, and as alluded to before, they’re wholly unique. I played through the Spring, Volcanic, Radioactive, and Winteria seasons in the first year, and the final three have their own gimmicks and currencies. These were welcome, as they forced me to tweak my optimised routes to navigate certain dangers without being too overbearing. 

While Volcanic was my favourite aesthetically, Radioactive had some of the best gimmicks. For example, there may be a radioactive storm, and Super will have to hold his breath. A second stamina bar appears next to your permanent one, which would quickly tick downward when out working the fields. To replenish it, Super has to return to the squishy box jellyfish home and take another breath of clean air. For some folks this may sound like an annoying thorn in your side. But for a game that streamlines farming and converts it into a match-3-adjacent game, these kinds of environmental changes during the seasons prevented the game from becoming stale.

By the time I was deep into Winteria, I felt extremely comfortable with the game’s design. I was swimming in nearly every currency that Super Farming Boy throws at you. The economic mechanic felt beyond busted, though. The biggest bottleneck to overwhelming the game was the end-of-season tax on the first day of a new season. Korpo will visit and take a percentage of whatever money you have on hand, which grew into six digits by the end of my first year. After completing the one year, the tax grew to 80%. 

The increasing cut hurts, but it wasn’t hard to earn it back. After paying for a few buildings to be completed, it was clear that they were the real money sinks of the game. Upon a new year’s arrival there is an increase in all costs, including in all shops. Super Farming Boy is building towards a breaking point in which you’ll confront Korpo for his unrelenting greed, but Early Access ends before you get there. The game ran out of substantial goals in year 2, despite its core design still being engaging. 

I don’t think I could tell you that Super Farming Boy really is a farming sim. There’s little in the game feel or design that invites you to enjoy the idyllic and ponderous tedium of slowly turning a giant weed bed into a highly manicured and profitable farm. Instead, it’s frenetic combo popping, dripping with Saturday morning cartoon fever dream absurdism and a colour palette that Crayola would be jealous of. 

I also don’t think it really matters that no one-liner descriptor comes to mind or that it’s not a traditional farming sim. In fact, it just might be a better game for it. What I can say is that Super Farming Boy points towards an exciting future, for itself and for management sims broadly. The bedrock is there, and with time and community feedback, I’m confident that Super Farming Boy will become something refreshing in the indie corner of the video game industry.