A confession: this feature was supposed to be published weeks ago, but I could not, for the life of me, stop playing Moonlight Peaks.
I say this with full awareness that if you had asked me last month whether I had any appetite left for another farming sim, I would have told you, with eye-rolling conviction, that I was done. Burnt out. The genre had calcified into a loop I could recite in my sleep: plant, water, gift a fish to a stranger until they love you, repeat.
And yet here I was at 2 a.m., trying to romance a werewolf while growing magical beetroot by moonlight, having sunk hundreds of hours into a game I was supposed to be writing about instead of playing.
The game has only itself to blame.
Plant, water, gift, repeat
Forget saving the world. Try watering parsnips in the rain, befriending a town of strangers one gifted amethyst at a time, and inheriting a plot of land from a relative you conveniently never met.
That is the strikingly cozy premise of the farming sim, a genre that Story of Seasons invented decades ago, that Stardew Valley perfected in 2016 and sold thirty million copies doing so, and that has since spawned so many imitators on Steam that farming sims, according to GameDiscoverCo‘s 2025 genre analysis, make up over 10% of the simulation genre. Just for context, the simulation category on Steam houses racing, dating, walking, job, political, immersive, rhythm, and just plain “simulation.” Farming sims are elbowing past most of them (also, what even are genres anymore?)
Nicole Carpenter saw the farming sim wave coming. She wrote about the golden era of farming simulators back in 2022, when a single Nintendo Direct showcased four of them, and the community celebrated rather than flinched.
That was before the wave really crested. Since then, the genre has given us Coral Island, My Time at Sandrock, Sun Haven, Fae Farm, Fields of Mistria… all of them good, most of them beloved, and each one arriving in a market that was getting a little more crowded every season.
So I did what any reasonable person would do: I contacted the developers behind five farming sims (Moonlight Peaks, Crop, Grave Seasons, Pao Pao, and Sunkissed City) and asked them why they were planting seeds in soil everyone says is exhausted.
Here’s what they had to say about it.
“If anything, Moonlight Peaks is the peak”
When I asked Yannis Bolman, director of Moonlight Peaks at Dutch studio Little Chicken Game Company, whether the farming sim boom had already peaked, he shot it down outright
“No, we don’t agree,” he told me. “If anything, Moonlight Peaks is the peak ;)” — yes, winky face included and all — “But all joking aside, we feel that it’s more about the genre maturing and expanding into audiences that simply never had a proper taste of farming sims. We feel there is still a lot to explore in the genre, more new things to add, more themes to explore.”
The game, published by XSEED Games and part of the Marvelous family that nurtured the genre with Story of Seasons, launched July 7 across five platforms simultaneously.
The classic farming sim loop is all there: seasons and crops and relationships that deepen over time. But you’re Dracula’s nepo baby, so you can turn into a bat to get around, and your spells do half the farmwork for you.
Lead designer Ties van Kipshagen told me the team pushed hardest on theme, decoration, and story. “We wanted all parts of the game to be filled with supernaturalism and magic,” he said.
“Everything from vampire forms to get around, to spells and cultivating magical crops. We also wanted players to decorate with everything. As an example, even the logs you harvest from trees are nice to decorate with!”
Here is the thing about a supernatural setting, though, and Bolman put it better than I could: it frees you. “You can get away with a lot more mechanics, or need less explanation for them, because of course it makes sense your main character would be able to turn into a bat at one point, or cat for that matter,” he said. “Making the furniture float with telekinesis rather than having the player move it without explanation is another example. If anything, having a supernatural theme is liberating.”
The concept came together almost by accident. Little Chicken tried surfing as a theme, then hiking, but nothing stuck until their Art Director, Mia, suggested vampires. They ran a survey and found out players loved the idea.
XSEED, for their part, gave Little Chicken room to be weird. “They pretty much said, ‘you guys know what you’re doing, you have our trust to just do it as best as you can,'” Bolman recalled. “Which is a pretty nice vote of confidence.”
The result, which you can check out for yourself, is 900+ reviews and 88% positive on Steam. So it looks like the confidence was well-placed.
“Horror can be very effective when it seeps into everyday life” – Crop
If Moonlight Peaks kept the template and lacquered it in supernatural charm, there is a whole cohort of farming sims that want to take the genre somewhere considerably darker.
Crop, the upcoming game from Carbonara Studio opens with its protagonist disoriented, half-naked, in the rain. Long gone are the days of a cheerful bus ride to a countryside inheritance. You won’t find a letter from a dead grandpa here; just a person in a storm and a lot of questions.
“We always wanted the game to start with a bang, throwing you into a situation you don’t fully understand and with a lot of questions,” director Adrian Tingstad Husby told me. “We wanted you to immediately understand that Crop operates in a different space than most farming games.”
That different space draws from “Metroidbrainia” games like Outer Wilds, where progress comes from the player piecing together a larger narrative, and from David Lynch…though the team admitted feeling “wildly uneasy” about the press slapping this tag on their game.
Well, that’s too damn bad! The influence is right there, and it’s a compliment.
What Crop borrows from Lynch is the atmosphere: “finding the uncanny within the ordinary, that dreamlike atmosphere, the pace, and the willingness to let things feel off and mystery exist without immediately explaining everything.”
And what it keeps from the farming sim is the rhythm. “A lot of Crop is slow, meditative, and focused on the rhythms of farm work,” they explained. “What interests us is the contrast between those quieter moments and the more intense twists and turns.”
Even the farming itself has been overhauled into something deliberately tactile, grubby, and real. “We’ve ended up with both core mechanics and a general flavor that we haven’t seen in many farming games,” they said. “Like our approach to dirt and water, pests and pesticides, raking, grass handling, composting pig manure, and even some light survival elements.”
When I asked whether the genre needed to go somewhere weirder to stay interesting, he got all philosophical. “The pendulum swings, and it’s all part of a wider cultural shift,” they said. “We’ve had so many cozy, colorful farming sims by now that it’s natural a lot of people are experimenting.”
And because farming games are comparatively accessible to build and carry a lower commercial risk, they’ve become what Adrian called “a natural space for experimentation.” He cited Dredge and Inscryption as wider inspirations, too, as they are games that took familiar genres and bent them into something different.
They are far from alone.
“Wrapped in a gently evil hug” – Grave Seasons
Grave Seasons, developed by Perfect Garbage Studios and published by Blumhouse Games (yes, that Blumhouse) drops an escaped convict into a farming town where a serial killer is picking off the locals.
Blumhouse Games’ Creative Director Louise Blain described the premise in terms that make you want to play immediately: “The horror in Grave Seasons is much more insidious and wrapped in a gently evil hug. Yes, there’s coziness in your day-to-day farming activities, but when you discover that a monstrous serial killer is picking off the townsfolk, you’re faced with the very real possibility of losing your new friends.”
Of course, she knows good horror doesn’t need dark corridors and jump scares to work. “At Blumhouse Games we’re of the strong opinion that horror comes in many forms,” she told me. What Grave Seasons delivers, she said, is both “cozy promises” and “splattery, pixelated murder.”
Creative Director Son M. pointed out something that comfortable farming sim players tend to forget. “Farming sims are deceptively low stakes, but there is consistent high-stakes decision-making happening within the loop,” he said. “Crops die if you are ill-prepared for season changes. Animals are hurt if you leave them out at night. Relationships deteriorate if you don’t engage with an NPC.”
OK? I absolutely did not consent to being called out like this, but whatever.
Then he went further, and this is the part that stuck with me. “In classic Harvest Moons, animals would die,” he said. “If you failed to track their health, left them in the rain, didn’t save up enough for animal medicine, your beloved cow would die. You knew, at the end of the day, it was your decision-making that led to this outcome.”
The genre, in other words, has always had teeth, but Grave Seasons just decided to show them.
Narrative Director Emmett Nahil traced the horror-on-the-farm impulse back to something older, something rooted. “It goes back to the core of folk horror, and domestic horror, which plays upon those fears of darkness lurking at the edges of something calming or beautiful, and cranks those apprehensions up to eleven.”
But (and this matters!) the team insisted the melding was born from love for both halves. “We are genuinely enthusiastic about both horror and cozy games alike,” Nahil said, “and we went about that melding of two loves as earnestly as possible.”
When things go wrong for the player, they told me, the design doesn’t punish but redirects. “We lean into interesting consequences instead of just punishment for punishment’s sake,” Nahil explained, “and that lets us have interesting story moments that come from your own actions.”
“Cozy does not always have to mean slow and quiet” – Pao Pao
Not every new farming sim wants to scare you, though. Some want to redefine what comfort looks like in the first place.
Pao Pao is a co-op restaurant life sim that uses farming as one ingredient in a much bigger recipe. The team was deliberate about centering the restaurant over the farm. “Farming is part of the world,” they told me, “but the restaurant is the promise.”
When I asked about saturation, their response reframed the conversation entirely: “I think the genre is crowded, but I do not think players are tired of this type of game,” they said. “What feels tired is when every game follows the same structure too closely.”
Their answer to that exhaustion was rethinking coziness from the ground up. “For us, cozy does not always have to mean slow and quiet,” they told me. “Cozy can also be a funny evening with friends, where everyone is running around, someone forgets a dish, someone saves the order at the last second, and everyone laughs.”
Right? Why do we keep talking about farming sims like they’re all lavender fields and lo-fi playlists? Anyone who’s actually played one knows the panic of realizing it’s the 27th of Fall and your pumpkins aren’t ready, and you forgot to feed the chickens, and there’s a festival tomorrow you haven’t prepped for.
The rhythm is soothing and frantic, often in the same in-game day. Pao Pao just stops pretending that the second part doesn’t exist and builds the whole game around it.
The goal, they emphasized, was warmth without punishment. “We want players to feel a bit of pressure during a shift, but not feel punished,” they said. “The goal is to create moments where players feel, ‘We almost lost it, but we made it together.'”
“People are sick of playing half-finished games of this type” – Sunkissed City
Arthur Lee, the former Stardew Valley developer behind the upcoming Sunkissed City, also did not buy the boom framing from the start.
When I reached out about the farming sim landscape, his first response set the tone: “I dunno if there’s a boom on farming sims anymore.”
Anymore?! Pack it up, everyone. The boom is over. Someone turn off the lights on the way out.
But as our exchange unfolded, he landed on something more specific that I think nobody in this space has been willing to say out loud. “I think where things get muddy is with the Early Access of it all,” Lee told me. “I think people are sick of playing half-finished games of this type.”
For him, the genre isn’t saturated with farming sims, but with unfinished farming sims. Too many games were launched incomplete and trained an entire audience to associate the category with incompleteness. The whole saturation conversation has blight in it, and this is where it starts.
And sure, Fields of Mistria is gorgeous proof that a farming sim can still walk into a packed room and own it. But for every Mistria, the last five years gave us ten games that asked for your money, your time, and your faith, and then told you the ending was coming in a patch.
Lee’s own game swaps the pastoral countryside for an urban megacorp city called Apollo. Social media has its hold on the inhabitants, and the central story is about fighting corporate apathy. “The game starts off with you having a garden on your apartment’s rooftop,” he told me, “but it quickly spirals into having an illegal garden plot that you can manage.”
The setting started as a fun genre twist, but the world caught up to it. “The general feeling of the characters being resigned to technology was there from the start,” Lee said, “but I think it’s only been amplified by how the world’s changed in the past five-ish years I’ve spent working on the game.”
He described his friends in tech being forced to learn tools they know will eventually replace them, and how that creeping resignation seeped into the game’s DNA. “It’s obviously very ‘old man yelling at clouds’y,” he added, which made me laugh and then immediately feel a little devastated.
Unlike the other games in this feature, Lee isn’t trying to reinvent anything. He just wants to refine what’s already there with features that make you go “oh, yeah, I can’t believe this is the first game to do this.”
And even with all the saturation talk, something caught him off guard. “I’m surprised by how engaged the farming game community is as a whole,” he told me. “Somehow, every game has its fans who want to talk about these games.”
That community exists because developers keep giving it reasons to stay. When a genre stops doing that, the story ends differently.
A Cautionary Tale on Four Legs
Remember horse games? I spent an unreasonable portion of 2006 playing Petz Horsez 2 on a family computer that could barely run it, fully convinced I was training for a career in equestrian sport I would never, under any circumstances, pursue. I loved those games with my whole 10-year-old chest. And then they died.
Two hundred and fifty-three. That’s how many horse games came out in the 2000s, most of them cheaply made rehashes targeting the same narrow audience. The genre collapsed. Releases cratered to 107 in the 2010s, even as the total number of games being made globally ballooned. It has taken until very recently for horse games to show the faintest pulse of recovery, maybe because of that horse racing girl anime gacha, Umamusume: Pretty Derby.
Farming sims do not have to follow that trajectory, and the developers I spoke to are proof. Like, just look at them:
Moonlight Peaks filled the template with vampires, bat transformations, and enchanted beetroot.
Crop is composting the whole thing into something Lynchian and strange and covered in pig manure.
Grave Seasons is burying a serial killer underneath it, wrapped in what the team so perfectly called “a gently evil hug.”
Pao Pao is building a restaurant on top of it and daring you not to laugh when your friend forgets the dish.
Sunkissed City is planting an illegal garden on a rooftop and fighting corporate apathy with a trowel.
None of them sound like the same game.
The farming sim is alive. I would know, because I’m itching to finish writing this outro so I can go back to watering my magical beetroots and chucking diamonds at my werewolf girlfriend.
If the rest of these games are even half as good as the people making them believe they are, I am not going to recover from those either. This is both a promise and a problem for my deadlines.
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