The pitch for Roots of Pacha is it’s Stardew Valley with cavemen. Say hello to my cavemansona, Mat, who’s jacked from a lifetime of carrying stacks of rocks to and fro. He’s never cut his hair.
I played a demo of Roots of Pacha at PAX East last year and I was charmed by all of the livestock being like ostriches and mammoths and whatnot, but overall found it a bit meh. Since everyone at the con was playing it all weekend, the save file was like maxed out, and it didn’t show off the tech-tree advancement and town-building elements which are Roots of Pacha’s best innovations on the farming simulator formula. Basically, the setting is this pastiche of hypothetical neolithic culture that’s right on the cusp of the agricultural revolution. This means there’s no friendly shopkeeper to sell you seeds (initially, anyway), so you actually have to go wander around the outskirts of town to forage for edible plants before you can grow anything. As you grow more and more crops, your “wild tomato”, for example, will level up and become domesticated into the classic “normal tomato” we know and love today. I love this system so much, since it combines the foraging and agriculture systems of other games and gives you an incentive to grow a variety of crops instead of going all-in on a single cash crop once you figure out what’s lucrative.
Another cool thing is that you’re encouraged to cook really early on. The town’s main hall has a public kitchen, and once you move out of your grandparents’ house into your own place (which also happens really early) you can upgrade your kitchen with new appliances that allow you to cook new recipes. The cooking system itself is fantastic - every ingredient and recipe is parameterized, so for example, oats are a “harvest” and a “grain” so you can use them in any recipe that requires “grain”. Other unlockable tools can open up new ingredients. For example, you can use a press to turn oats into oat milk, and then, since that’s “milk”, you can use cheese cloth to make oat cheese, and use that for any recipe that requires “cheese”. Processing your produce like this obviously makes it more lucrative (worth more “contributions”, the totally-not-just-currency) but it’s also a lot of fun to hang on to ingredients for the future and try to 100% the cookbook. Especially because all the food is rendered in wonderfully vibrant pixel art.
The game is very pretty overall which somehow isn’t the impression I got from the promotional material, which is a bit bad-mobile-game-esque.
Something else I love is the quest system, which is leaps and bounds more satisfying than in any other farming game I’ve played. As you hit certain milestones, members of your clan will get “ideas” for improving the community. If you bring them the components they request (for example, a certain amount of stone so they can experiment water storage) they’ll get researching and when they’re done a new tool will become available. This can be as basic as a well for accessing fresh water on your farm, but it can also be something that affects the entire town. Helping one person learn to ride livestock unlocks an entire racing minigame, for example, and you don’t even have a clock in the UI until you help someone invent the sundial. The tech tree is implicit, there’s not like a big graph in a menu somewhere, but the way you watch the settlement grow and develop as you discover more things is really great. There’s also certain contribution milestones that the entire community contributes towards that unlock non-gameplay town improvements like hammocks for napping or railings along the riverside so kids don’t get washed away. New ideas pop up in your quest log every morning without you having to do anything which really lends to that “just one more day” itch that makes this sort of a game so fun.
Other stuff I like:
- the fishing minigame is good
- you befriend wild animals via rhythm minigame
- you can have pets which are separate from livestock
- the animals they chose to include are just inspired
- tools and seeds are grouped into dedicated inventory slots so they’re always organized
- prankster grandpa = the best
- big frog pot
The one thing that hasn’t clicked with me is the characters, at least not all of them. They’re all very well designed but honestly the fact that they’re just sort of normal people makes it hard for me to tell them apart. This is compared to Stardew Valley where every character is so trope-ridden that it’s easy to slot them into categories in your mind. Roots of Pacha avoids this and the characters are probably more nuanced, but let’s just say I’m really glad the map shows you where people when you have a quest to turn in. I also don’t super love the caves, which are sort of the analogue for both Stardew’s mines and community center. They’re just a bit confusing, but it’s not so bad once you unlock the map.
All in all, I think people are sleeping on this game. It’s not just another half-baked Stardew Valley clone!
[[ backlog master post ]]