Farm

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in multiple bundles. Check out this page for more information.)

Farm, sometimes referred to as Farm Puzzle, is a Puzzle game released on Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game presents players with a pen filled with a mix of animals, and they must select animals to move them and bring them out of the pen. So… this game might have been more accurately named “Ranch”, I suppose.

In any case, Farm is an “order of operations” puzzle where your success is tied to the order in which you command animals to move. At least… that’s the case in theory. In practice, the earlier levels of the game seem to indicate it doesn’t really matter, since you’re unlikely to fill up the bar at the bottom so you’re incapable of continuing. This bar empties only as identical animal pairs are brought out of the pen, but there’s enough space that you can get multiple different animal types out before it fills up, leaving you plenty of leeway to go in whichever order you like, for the most part.

It’s only later, when the game introduces switches and gates that it gets a bit trickier, and the game does a poor job explaining or demonstrating how these work, leaving it up to players to figure that out. This results in this making for a huge difficulty spike, going almost in an instant from a game that featured brain-dead puzzles to one that’s actually a bit tricky. I feel like this would have been much nicer if the challenge ramped up more smoothly.

Another issue here is that this game uses an on-screen cursor that moves as slow as molasses, making the relatively simple process of selecting one animal after another into something far more time-consuming and tedious than it needs to be.

The presentation here is decent but nothing to write home about, with simple 2D pixel art backgrounds and animals, plenty of animal sounds, and on occasional brief piano tune when you’re about to complete a level. It works, but it’s nothing memorable or inspired.

In the end, I think Farm had some decent ideas that could have made for an interesting order-of-operations Puzzle game, but it’s hurt by that sharp difficulty spike caused in part by poor communication of game mechanics to the player. I think some players may find some enjoyment here, but this game definitely feels like it needed more work to smooth out its difficulty curve.

tl;dr – Farm is a Puzzle game that has players deciding what order to let animals out of a pen to get them to all leave properly. This game’s puzzle design has a lot of potential, but it’s really hurt by a terrible difficulty curve that goes from brain-dead to tricky instantly. The result is a game that has some good things going for it, but needed a lot more work.

Grade: C-

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