Hello! This week’s Game of the Week is Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life. It’s a farming simulator and a remake – the third remake! – of the first game that our reviewer Lottie can remember counting down the days for. It seems like a proper treat, with judicious tweaks but nothing that alters the texture of the original too much. I will give it a go at some point.
Even if the remake hadn’t completely nailed the job, games like Story of Seasons are always worth thinking about. I remember reading EDGE in the early 2000s, and a game like this – or a game like Animal Crossing – would always stand out. They seemed so different. What’s that? Where does it come from? How does it work?
I suspect the reason – for me at least – why farming simulators and Animal Crossing type stuff always felt so strange and new is because my introduction to console games was mainly in the form of platformers and other side-scrollers. Looking back at it now, videogames, from the early days of home computers even, were games that saw me going somewhere. I started on the left of the screen and moved to the right. I scrolled or the screen switched or whatever, but staying put was never an option. Onwards! Movement! Run!