Good evening everybody! This is Aifos coming to you alive from Yanato! I’m completely lost, and don’t know how to get home, and a weird bridge appeared in the sky, and I’m scared, and please send help! And bring some rice; I’m [b]starving![/b] Oh, speaking of rice, have I got a game for you! In Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin, you play as the titular Princess Sakuna, sent to the ominously named Isle of Demons to cleanse the island of its demonic menace! And indeed, who better to handle such a task than Sakuna; daughter of a powerful warrior god! However, befitting its name, the demons inhabiting this isle are powerful, and numerous, and taking them on by sheer force is a fool’s errand. Luckily, Sakuna inherited power from both her parents, and her mother was a harvest goddess! What that means is Sakuna can gain power from growing rice! Haha, I can already hear those demons cowering in their metaphorical boots! This sets up the basic gameplay loop of the game; You must delve into levels, fighting demons and gathering resources.. Which can then be used to grow your rice crop, which makes you stronger.. So you can head into higher leveled areas, and fight more demons, and gather more resources. Of course, if either side of this coin was boring, then the game would fall apart. Luckily, that is not the case, and both halves of the game are fun enough to be full fledged games in their own right! Let’s start by talking about the levels, and combat; [spoiler]Levels take place in a 2.5D enviornment. There are a few light platforming challenges, and some clever secret pathways, but most of your time in the levels will be spent fighting hordes of demons. To this end, the game is a fast paced hack ‘n slash. You have your light attacks, heavy attacks, and special moves, you can knock baddies into the air and juggle them around, y’know, all pretty standard stuff. It all feels really nice, but nothing you wouldn’t have seen before.. That is, except for Sakuna’s signature weapon; the Divine Raiment! It is a magical scarf, capable of extending and retracting at will, latching ont—It’s a grappling hook. You can use it for all your regular grappling hook needs; grabbing onto walls, pulling enemies closer to you, swinging around the baddies like Spiderman, and my personaly favorite, chucking demons across the room into their fellow demon’s faces! We’ve seen grappling hooks many times in platformers, of course, but I’ve never seen one so combat oriented before, and it is an absolute blast to use! It’s probably the most fun combat system I’ve seen in a [i]long[/i] time![/spoiler] Now for the hub, and the farming! [spoiler]Now, when I say “farming game” you probably imagine something like Harvest Moon, or Stardew Valley, where you line up the plants in the dirt, water them with a can, or sprinklers, and such, right? Well, in Rice and Ruin, the crops you grow are, as you might guess from the name, rice. And rice is weird. In order to grow rice, you plant the seeds in an enclosed field, and then flood the whole thing with water. So, rather than water everything individually, your job is to instead manage the water level, and keep the sun from evaporating it all away, and keep the rain from filling it too high, while also managing things like weeds, and crafting fertilizer. Cut off from the city, though, you have to do all the work, not just the planting. That includes harvesting, drying, threshing, tilling, so on, so forth. I’ve never actually grown rice, so I can’t say if it’s a super accurate representation of the process, but at the very least it [i]feels[/i] like it is. Like most farming games, this all probably sounds rather dull and monotonous on paper, but I personally find it really to be a really fun, and relaxing change of pace. It’s always a nice break to come back home after slaughtering hordes of demons and tend to the rice fields. And what do you do with all this rice? Well, for one, as I mentioned previously, it acts as your EXP gauge. Every time you complete a harvest, your stats go up based on its quality. Fertilizers let you control what aspects of the rice and improved, letting you customize your build. Beyond that, Sakuna may be a goddess, but she’s still got to eat. Rice is your main food, though the ingredients you gather can also be used to make meals. If Sakuna is starving, she’ll cease to regenerate health, making eating at least one meal a day something of a necessity unless you never get hit. There seems to be a decent amount of depth to explore to the cooking system—though, it’s not a minigame; you just choose what you want to eat, which gives you stat buffs and the like for the next day—but I haven’t delved too deep there. Ultimately, I think the farming’s really fun, and if you enjoy games like Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon, I think you will, too![/spoiler] The game is laced with a lot of systems to wind the two halves together, so that they intertwine in a natural, seamless way. Unfortunately, while this is arguably the game’s greatest strength, it is also it’s greatest weakness. Because, well, you can’t play one half of the game without the other. While that’s great most of the time, if you’re ever [i]just[/i] in the mood to sit back and farm, or cut down demons, you can’t, really. Not without also doing the other. Ultimately, though, that’s a pretty minor complaint, and it’s pretty much my only one. It’s a bit pricier than most of the games I’ll be recommending, sitting at about $40, but so far, I think it was worth every penny! [b][u]Tl;dr? Here’s my point![/b][/u] You should play Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin! Final verdict: [url=https://youtu.be/jWwYE7P55Wg]GRAPPLING HOOK![/url] out of 10! That’s all for now folks! Jambuhbye!