Now reaching the end of the Switch era, and seeing the full landscape of the indie space over its lifespan, there’s no question that Stardew Valley may have been one of its most influential indie stars. While farming and life sims had certainly been around for quite some time beforehand, its mixture of elements simply seemed to hit a sweet spot that catapulted it to notoriety. Unfortunately, it has also spawned entirely too many attempts by others to recapture that success, but more often than not these have been devoid of the charm and care put into crafting an amazing experience, happy to simply ape some of its moves and hope it would be enough. Ashwood Valley, unfortunately, is another such title that shares some details with that indie darling, but comes up embarrassingly short of even a fraction of its charm and playability.

Starting with the relatively short list of things that work, there’s no question that the base visual style of the game is at least pleasant… though with a more fantasy-driven aesthetic in places. The hodgepodge of things that look real-world intermingled with the more fantastic isn’t something that thrilled me, but I suppose it’s at least distinct, and could appeal to people who want something a bit more cutesy. I’ll also note that I appreciate the lack of being tied down to an inventory that I quickly had a need to manage. Your primary tools are on their own, and accessible with a press in the proper direction on the D-Pad, and your items are nicely broken down by category and often have helpful descriptions to give you direction on their use.

If only the positives were able to continue from that point, but it doesn’t take much effort to bump into issues. The first is that you simply aren’t given much in the way of direction out of the gate, requiring quite a bit of aimless wandering as you try to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing. Yes, you’ll figure things out as you bump into different animals, people, and places, but it would be a poor way to help players new to the genre get acclimated for sure. Another issue that’s even more unfortunate is the game’s weirdly slow performance. I suppose a visual flair when you change tools is nice in theory, but after the second time it’s utterly wasted and slows people down. Similarly, delays and slow animations when performing tasks you’ll be doing hundreds or thousands of times seem incredibly wasteful and make doing simple jobs take longer than it should. Lastly, when you move through the world it’s at a somewhat brisk pace, and when you do things like turn this can make the camera swing around a bit, which can be unpleasant, and may not make it a great match for people who can get motion sickness.

All that said, the biggest sin of all is that even with a thorough knowledge of the competition out there, this doesn’t appear to have made an attempt to step up to the plate and even begin to match the level of quality needed to be worthwhile. This simply feels like you’re going through some of the motions, checking off boxes for necessary elements and activities, getting them implemented mostly in a bare bones manner, and then moving on. To stand out in this space at all there needs to be an aura of the game being a project borne of love, this simply feels like another lackluster cash-in.