Farmer’s Life Review: Grit, Grime, and Goats in a Farming Sim with a Darker Twist

If you’ve grown bored of chirpy farming sims full of sunshine, festivals, and pastel produce, Farmer’s Life might be the grimy palate cleanser you didn’t know you needed. This is farming stripped of the fantasy; mud-caked, booze-soaked, and deeply human. You’re not stepping into the shoes of a wide-eyed entrepreneur; you’re playing Kazimir, a post-war alcoholic trying to keep both his farm and his life from falling apart. It’s dark, it’s weird, and it’s oddly compelling. But on Xbox, it also comes with a whole heap of jank, a steep learning curve, and enough rough edges to nick a tractor tire.

At its core, Farmer’s Life is a survival-based farming sim that leans far harder into realism than most games in the genre. Sure, you can grow crops and raise animals, but you’ll also be feeding chickens while hungover, fixing fences with broken tools, and trying not to pass out from hunger or exhaustion. Unlike Stardew Valley or Farming Simulator, the game doesn’t hold your hand. There’s no friendly tutorial or welcoming quest log. You’re dumped into a ramshackle plot of land and left to figure it out.

That’s part of the charm… and part of the problem. The learning curve is brutal. Menus are dense, objectives are vague, and systems are stacked on top of one another with minimal explanation. You’ll go hours before understanding how certain tools or recipes work, and it’s easy to make mistakes that set you back significantly. Want to raise pigs? Better make sure you’re not too tired to feed them. Forgot to eat yourself? Enjoy blacking out in the weeds.

Still, once you get over the initial hump, the sheer amount of activities available is impressive. You can plow fields, smoke meat, fix up tractors, trade with villagers, distill moonshine, or just sit in your crumbling house and stew in existential dread. The day-to-day grind is oddly satisfying, even as the game leans into its bleak tone. There’s a rhythm to the work, and a strange comfort in surviving another day as the world quietly decays around you.

The narrative direction sets Farmer’s Life apart from its genre peers. Kazimir isn’t some blank slate avatar; he’s a deeply flawed character with baggage. His alcoholism isn’t just a character trait; it affects gameplay, relationships, and even the tone of your interactions. The writing is surprisingly introspective, touching on themes of trauma, isolation, and the struggle for redemption. It’s not always elegant, but it adds a rare emotional layer to a genre that usually avoids getting too personal.

That said, the presentation often undercuts the tone. The game’s visuals are firmly rooted in the early-2010s Euro-jank aesthetic: muddy textures, stiff animations, and a UI that feels like it was designed on a potato. On Xbox, the framerate can stutter during busy moments, and environmental clipping is common. It’s playable, but far from polished. What hurts more is the voice audio for when it exists, it’s distractingly bad. Character barks , are repetitive and, poorly mixed, and often hilariously out of place, swinging between flat and unintentionally cartoonish. You’ll hear the same slurred grunts over and over, and they never stop being immersion-breaking. Thankfully, you can turn it off.

The control scheme on console, while functional, lacks finesse. Navigating menus with a controller feels clunky, and precision tasks like animal herding or plowing often lead to frustration. It’s manageable once you get the hang of it, but there’s no denying this is a game designed for mouse and keyboard first and it shows.

Despite these drawbacks, there’s something undeniably captivating about Farmer’s Life. When the systems click and your farm starts to resemble something vaguely functional, the payoff is real. You’ve earned every chicken egg, every brick of smoked meat, every moment of peace between disasters. And in a genre filled with idealized fantasy, that’s a refreshing change.

Farmer’s Life is not for everyone. It’s rough, unforgiving, and frequently inelegant. But it’s also ambitious, atmospheric, and deeply human in a way few sims are. On Xbox, it suffers from UI and control issues, bad voice audio, and dated visuals, but its unconventional narrative and breadth of interaction still manage to shine through. If you’re willing to wrestle with its jank and embrace the bleakness, you’ll find a farming sim unlike any other; one that digs into the dirt, the darkness, and the messy reality of survival.

RATING: 3.5 out of 5.

Farmer’s Life is available for PC and Xbox Series S/X.
_{Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.game.press}

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