What you’ll often find in the indie gaming space are the extremes of both those games that break new ground and are set to exceed expectations, and those that (at best) feel like they’re going through the motions. Whether intentionally or not, many of these titles lower on the totem pole feel like they’re trying to emulate a specific game or genre but only learned a small portion of how to do so successfully. The results are titles that have several of the hallmark elements of the genre in question, but then often utterly fail to seal the deal by coming up short on many others.

Dreamland Farm absolutely fits into that latter category, feeling like a game inspired by the likes of Stardew Valley and other farm sims, but that either ran out of time or desire to do more than execute that formula only on a basic level. Truly, it feels like they got the fundamentals into place, working in some form, but then failed to make it feel accessible and fun. Most critical of all, the failure to include a quickbar at the bottom, or a very simple and efficient way to move between tools is absolutely felt (almost constantly), but in general interacting with your inventory is an unfortunate chore and quickly saps enthusiasm almost every time you do it, since it is such a fundamental part of the subgenre.

The thing is, there are core elements of play for the genre present, and it even appears they have some fair depth, there’s just no magic or fun tied to them. You could choose to deal with the shortcomings, and sort of force it along, but when there are so many better executed farm sims out there on the system, why would you waste time and energy on a title that fundamentally got so many things wrong?