I planted a garden last year and, while it wasn’t the most successful horticultural venture in history, I managed to grow a ton of jalapenos. More jalapenos than I was able to eat over the course of the summer, as evidenced by the massive bottle of green hot sauce still sitting in my fridge.
Gardening isn’t a walk in the park, even in the relatively ideal situation I enjoyed, working with a small plot in a community-owned garden five minutes from my house. Now imagine you’re attempting to make a go of it while surrounded by a toxic purple cloud with no company except for a talking cat named Huckleberry. In Homestead Arcana, that’s exactly the task that heroine Billie has taken on.
RELATED:Whitethorn Games Is Building A Cozy Games Empire
Playing as Billie — or whatever name you choose — you tend to an ever-expanding garden in a sanctuary, but also need to venture out into the miasma that has fallen upon the land. The name Homestead Arcana is also the name of the program Billie belongs to which sent her here, dedicated to restoring the parts of the world that have been overtaken by the cloud.
AtPAX East, I played about 25 minutes of Homestead Arcana, and got a taste for the way the game’s two sides — the gardening and the adventuring — intersect. Though I didn’t do any planting, I interacted with some of the plants that were already growing near Billie’s home when the demo began. One of the game’s cool features is that you can physically interact with each of your plants, manipulating the stalk and branches with your cursor. If you encounter a fruit tree in the wild, you can click on it to interact, use your cursor to pull the branch down to you and pluck a fruit off, then use it to replenish your ever-draining hunger gauge. Zhenghua Yang, founder and CEO of the game’s developer Serenity Forge, said that the plants being simulated in this way makes it possible to more fully customize their placement.
My mission for the demo is to find Billie’s Aunt Matilda’s grill which is somewhere inside the toxic cloud. I head down a path to the miasma, which appears as a deep purple curtain not too far from my garden. Before Billie enters, she dons something that looks an awful lot like a plague mask, which allows her to traverse the darker realm. Once she’s inside the miasma, I see a clock ticking down indicating how much time I have left to complete my mission before I need to get back to the land of the living.
Eventually, I find a seed for something called a dust eater which can be planted in a crack in the earth within the miasma. These plants, when grown, are the key to pushing back the miasma. Yang said that as players continue to play the game they will find more of these seeds, allowing them to gain ground on the miasma, and discover more behind the veil. Over time, Yang says they’ll find evidence of ancient civilizations hidden in the smog.
Homestead Arcana is being made by a small team which fluctuates in size, but is generally about a dozen strong. It’s set to launch in this month onPCandXbox, where it will sprout up onGame Passas a day one release.
NEXT:Project Dark Is Six Games you’re able to Play With Your Eyes Closed
