Welcome to Elderfield: you grow corn, pumpkins, teeth and eyeballs

There is a line on the store page that made me buy the game immediately: grow useful crops like corn, pumpkins, teeth or eyeballs.

The whole of Welcome to Elderfield is in that sentence. It is a farming game, it is very charming, and something is deeply wrong.

The idea: the abnormal is normal

Elderfield is a small town where the residents are odd, where ancient beings watch over you, and where the local news gets a little stranger by the day.

The game does not play on fear but on dissonance. Nobody panics. You are welcomed, settled in, invited to take part in local life. And those who wander into Elderfield rarely find a reason, or an option, to leave.

That is far more effective than a jump scare, because the unease comes not from a monster but from the normality with which everybody treats the abnormal.

What you do, and it is a full game

Do not be fooled by the packaging: there is a real life sim underneath.

You customise your home and your character. You unravel daily mysteries. You befriend the odd townsfolk, and you can marry one. You fish, you mine, you forage in the surrounding wilds.

On the farm side, you cultivate your land, harvest your crops, and stop the tentacles spreading. You manage otherworldly livestock. And you hope whatever lives in the woods does not wander onto your property.

The presentation, which is half the pleasure

Everything is hand-drawn in a style inspired by horror manga, which gives you faces far too still and blacks far too deep for a game where you plant pumpkins.

The music is a dark lo-fi soundtrack by Dated, and it does considerable work: it installs a continuous melancholy that stops the game tipping into parody.

The combat, which is not decorative

This is what separates Elderfield from the dozens of cozy farming games with a strange veneer.

There is a turn-based combat system in which you have to use gathered resources, strategic buffs and varied equipment to survive encounters with ancient horrors.

In other words, your harvest is not a score. It is your ammunition. Which finally connects the two halves of the game, where most games in the genre merely place them side by side.

And you choose your difficulty. Cozy mode offers a quiet life of harvest and discovery. If you want resistance, the Old Gods are waiting, and the studio nails its colours to the mast with an elegant question: how much suffering can you endure?

What it is worth

The game comes from Chris Cote, a solo developer, published by Kwalee, at 16.19 euros.

And the reception is excellent: 421 positive reviews out of 439, 96 per cent satisfied. That is the week's best score across all releases.

The accessibility options are plentiful for a game this size, with colour alternatives, contrast settings, subtitles and adjustable difficulty.

My only reservation belongs to the genre: a life sim is judged over dozens of hours, and three days after release nobody can tell you whether Elderfield holds up. What I can say is that the promise is kept from the first hour, and that I have never seen a farming game succeed this well at making me uncomfortable while weeding.

Which villager did you marry? We are not judging, we are comparing, on the InsertCoins Discord.