Across the Valley Review (PS5 / PSVR2)

Across the Valley is a hand-drawn style, farming simulator from the small indie developer, FusionPlay. Each in-game day lasts 15 minutes and as your role of farmhand you’ll have to fit in as many missions from the task board as possible before dark. The daily tasks around the farm include planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting crops; feeding, watering, and petting the livestock; and of course, shovelling the animal sh*t.

Tending to your crops is by far the most interactive of your activities. You’ll need to sprinkle your seeds evenly on each plot in your allotment, getting the most coverage possible to ensure the largest yield. You’ll also have to return daily to water or weed each patch and after a couple of days reap the rewards. Your harvest can then be used to feed the livestock or sell for a profit to the farmer’s market cart. The livestock (sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens) will also require daily visits for you to top up their water and feeding troughs, pet them, and muck out their barn. It’s all very simple to get done but feels more like a list of chores than a game and gets very repetitive. Other than your daily routines and a few very short minigames for shearing the sheep and milking the cows there is very little else to do.

The bugs don’t make it any more enjoyable as you’ll be resetting your position every time you teleport around the farm since you drift further and further from the wooden stool you are supposed to be perched on. This even causes you to clip into walls and other objects — at one point we even found ourselves inside a sheep! This, combined with the cumbersome tool interactions, wacky item collisions, and your hands often getting stuck and becoming immoveable, make these simple chores quite the tedious tasks.

Across the Valley has a lovely hand-drawn art style and some good simplistic gameplay ideas, but its execution isn’t up to snuff. It’s wide array of bugs, repetitive gameplay, and lack of content leave this farm without its Push Square or Red Tractor approval.