Farlands

The cosy farming sim is a crowded street these days, so the ones that stick need an angle. Farlands has a good one: you don’t buy a farm, you buy a planet — an abandoned agrarian rock at the edge of the galaxy that was going far too cheaply for anyone’s comfort. You arrive with a battered ship and an assistant droid, and the question of why nobody wanted this place hums quietly under everything you do.

Farming, but the map is a solar system

The opening hours are familiar in the best way: cut back weeds, clear paths, reclaim overgrown fields, repair what time has wrecked. It’s the satisfying restoration loop the genre runs on, rendered in warm, detailed 2D art that’s genuinely lovely to sit inside.

Then the ship becomes usable, and the game opens up. You hop between planets in the system, each with its own resources, terrain and handful of stubborn residents who stayed behind. Gathering materials off-world to upgrade your farm, your tools and the ship itself gives the grind a direction that a single valley can’t — and meeting the scattered locals, learning why they refused to leave, is where the writing does its best work. There’s a melancholy running through Farlands that most cosy sims don’t attempt.

The pitch is Stardew-in-space, but the loneliness is the point rather than a side effect.

A long road, mostly well travelled

This is worth crediting: Farlands spent two full years in Early Access, shipped ten major updates, and completed its published roadmap as planned before launching 1.0 in July. That’s a rarer outcome than it should be, and the lifetime Steam score reflects it — Very Positive, 89% of 1,613 reviews.

The 1.0 wobble

The honest caveat is what’s happened since. Recent reviews sit at Mixed, 67% of 76, a clear dip against that lifetime figure — the pattern you see when a launch surfaces balance and pacing complaints that the EA crowd had already made peace with. The most common friction points are a mid-game that leans grindy and content that thins toward the end. It’s also strictly single-player, and it ships in nine languages with no Turkish support.

Verdict

At $17.99 this is a warm, distinctive, unusually thoughtful farming sim with a hook the genre badly needed, made by a small team that kept every promise it made during Early Access. The recent review dip is worth knowing about and the mid-game does drag, but neither undoes what’s good here. If you like your cosy games with a little sadness and a spaceship, Farlands is an easy recommendation — go find out why that planet was so cheap.