The success of Natsume's Harvest Moon series is, at first glance, maybe a little confounding. You have to actually play the games to get the appeal, because "creating your own little farm from scratch" tends to conjure up images of virtual chores. In truth, the games are appealing because they're actually quite a bit of fun and, like most strategy games, have you juggling multiple things at once.
Japanese developer Success is apparently trying to ride the wave of Harvest Moon by crafting its own take on farming, but in IGN's first few hours with Shepherd's Crossing, it seems like it might not be channeling the right parts of the games to make this an enjoyable little time sink.
Siliconera Write: "Running a farm can be hard work, but playing a game about running a farm somehow makes the menial labor entertaining. Shepherd's Crossing is the latest contender in the same genre that games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing belong to.
Shepherd's Crossing lets me play a new inhabitant of a sleepy, farming town. Being a newbie farmer, I'm only given a small plot of land, a sickle, and some grass and pasture to tend to. By cutting the grass and pasture and selling it to the market, I can buy more grass and pasture seeds to plant more grass and pasture. What's the use of that? I can then cut some pasture, wait for it to change into hay, and then sell that for some marmots, which seem to be some kind of rodent. Similarly, once the marmots get mature enough, I can trade them for marmot meat, or cabbage seeds. Through this type of "trading up" system, players get to expand their farm to raise rabbits, hunting dogs, collect honey, farm wheat, and so on."
