Across The Valley Review

April 5, 2023

What I like about VR is its a medium that offers so many options, and Across The Valley is looking to bring farming simulation to the PSVR2. The question is does this yield a successful crop?

GAMEPLAY

Over the past few years games in both VR and flat-screen have tried to recapture the brilliance and gameplay loop of Stardew Valley, and for people who have played this you will get that feeling from Across The Valley.

This will see you planting, watering and growing crops, caring for livestock and making sure you sell your wares in order to improve your farms yield. All of this being done manually thanks to the power of Virtual Reality. At the start of the day you will be given daily tasks to complete around the farm, with these unlocking more things to do around the farm.

Out of all that the game offers simulation-wise the crop planting is the main feature of the game. You will need to go to the planting areas spread out the seeds evenly to get a better yield. You will then need to return daily to water or weed each allotment section and after a couple days pick your goods you have grown. You then use your crops in two ways, to help feed your livestock or to sell to the local markets.

Overtime and by completing tasks you will start to get more livestock, with the game offering chickens, sheep, pigs and cows. When these are added in, they will also require daily visits with petting, topping their water and food and mucking them out being required to keep them happy. The final element given by the livestock is some mini-games that will see you shearing sheep and milking cows, which adds a little extra to this part of the game.

However, your daily tasks all seem very easy to complete in the time given, and start to become a bit tedious, repetitive and feel more like chores than fun. So, that is the gameplay loop you are going to be recycling throughout your time playing Across The Valley.

PRESENTATION

One redeeming feature of Across The Valley was the teams approach to the visuals in the game, with them bringing a cute hand-drawn style. This suits the more simple and relaxed nature that the gameplay offers and gives you that little bit of a dopamine rush when petting your livestock.

They have matched the simplified graphics with simplified sounds to bring the farm to life, with it sort of reminding me of more childish sounds. This does work because it matches with the visuals you are taking in, but at times it can become a little irritating.

COMFORT/CONTROLS

The game can be played either seated or standing, but never mind which way I played it there was too many frustrations with how this all worked. A big gripe of mine is in order to move around the farm you point and teleport to where you want to be on the farm and it offers no sort of free locomotion. What causes these frustrations is, you will just teleport to random spots and in most cases you are way too far back and have to keep re-centering to get closer to where you wanted to be. This becomes annoying very quickly especially when it teleports you into parts of the environments or the animals.

Outside of these issues with the movement, I am not sure if it was a me problem but the tool interactions seemed odd, the hands seemed to get stuck at times and the collisions seemed a little strange in some places. With the position resets nearly every time I moved around the farm and the cumbersome interactions, it really did pull me out of the game a lot.

LONGEVITY

Each day will last around fifteen minutes in real time and you are going to need to fit in as many tasks as possible before it becomes dark. As aforementioned at first these tasks and goals will unlock more things for your farm. But, personally I found I could not last too long in sessions as this got tedious quite quickly.

REVIEWED USING PLAYSTATION VR 2

For the purposes of transparency, this review was created using a sample provided by the company or their respective PR company. The use of a press sample does not affect my judgement of the product.

REVIEW OVERVIEW

Across The Valley shows a game that could have promise and bring a laid back farming simulator to PSVR2. However, there is just too many bugs and little issues that hamper the experience to let it shine – even after a number of pre-launch patches. With what is currently available in the game and these issues it really is hard to spend time in Across The Valley, and if not reviewing it I am not sure I would have got as far as I did in the unlocking.

I hope these issues can be patched and a bit more can be added to the game over time, because as mentioned it shows promise – unfortunately it fails to shine.