Simple Joys of Slice of Life Games
WORDS BY Niamh Muldowny
With the release of a new Animal Crossing game just around the corner, I’ve been preoccupied with slice of life games. Instead of action and adventure, slice of life games aim to capture the mundanity of everyday life. It could be that of a new farmer starting out for the first time in the countryside, a student heading off to college, or a new villager in a town inhabited by animal people. Although these are mundane actions and objectives, slice of life games bring joy and importance to them. So let’s explore some of the more popular and interesting games in this genre. Harvest Moon is most likely the game that we have to thank for this genre. The first installment was released in 1996 for the SNES and has been a staple of the category since then, but whether playing on the SNES or 3DS, Harvest Moon games have followed the same formula. The player arrives into a town or island and comes into possession of a farm, and from here the game cycles through the days and seasons of a year in which they plant different crops and farm animals, along with building relationships with the surrounding townspeople. In Harvest Moon nature is magical and the farmer is often bringing balance back to the surrounding area by their work. Rune Factory, a fantasy spin off series of Harvest Moon, leans into the fantastical elements of the series. Here the player can be a farmer, an adventurer protecting the town from monsters, or a combination of both.
In recent years there’s been strong yearning to return to the simpler early days of Harvest Moon. This yearning culminated in the spiritual successor Stardew Valley, developed nearly single handedly by Eric Barone who goes by ConcernedApe online. First released in 2016 on PC, this game has been ported to Mac, Linux, Xbox One, PS4, Playstation Vita, Switch and mobile. The game has been periodically updated over the last four years, adding more relationship options, a multiplayer mode, and many more quality of life improvements. But at its core it is a simple - yet refined - farming, exploration and relationship sim, calling back to the 16-bit games of the past. Each day passes in about 12 actual minutes, the rushing to complete tasks before the end of the day creates a wonderfully morish gameplay loop. Let’s leave the farm now and explore a more life sim type of game. Animal Crossing with its five mainline games and three spin-off games has been around for nearly 19 years. In these games, the player arrives as the new inhabitant of a small town and can spend their real time days doing whatever their heart desires. This can be fishing, catching insects, talking with your animal neighbours, decorating your home, or saving money to pay off the mortgage on your home to Tom Nook. Over the years Animal Crossing has introduced new aspects to its games, such as city living, mayoral responsibilities, and most recently an island getaway, but at its heart it is the charm of the simple routines you’ll make that will bring you back again and again to this game. At its heart, however, the gameplay has stayed the same. Lastly, perhaps not a very well-known game, but one I spent many hours of my childhood on is Enchanted Folk and the School of Wizardry. This DS game was part of a bigger series but was the only entry to be released outside of Japan. This game lets you create a young wizard beginning their year at magic school and let you attend classes, make friends with your fellow students and solve magical mysteries. While it was a blatant copy of the Animal Crossing formula, the element of magic and the weekly challenges delighted me as a child. Looking back on it now, its graphics have aged dreadfully and the movement is floaty and unresponsive, but it captured my heart and my mind in living out this Hogwarts-esque fantasy. However, this game did succeed in capturing the mundane in the magical and the 28 magical in the mundane, which is for me the joy of the slice of life game - not the big magical moments, but the simple delights found in the routine of everyday life.
