Farmer’s Father: Save the Innocence is a World War 2 survival farming simulator by developers FreeMind S.A. Although it is a follow-up to their previously successful title, Farmer’s Life, utilizing many of the same assets and mechanics, this new prequel attempts to be considerably more historical and intense. While this new atmosphere often uniquely elevates this game, Farmer’s Father: Save the Innocence also leaves out many elements crucial for survival and farming games alike.
The best parts of this experience were the parts I assume to be borrowed from the previous title. The simulation of cutting trees, harvesting wood, caring for farm animals, and even hunting and fishing can be satisfying systems to interact with. For this reason, despite the faults of this game, its structure is still all built on a competent foundation. Sadly, other than the atmosphere of the war-torn snowy mountains, much of the benefit of this new setting is lost by lackluster gameplay and broken user experience.
Table of contents
Decent Survival Gameplay
One of the most competent aspects of Farmer’s Father is the primary survival gameplay loop. I’ve always immensely enjoyed the starting hours of new survival games, where you are down on your luck trying to make something out of scraps. The introduction of escaping your burning farm to go live deep in the woods with your wife and newborn child is a mighty motivation for survival gameplay.
Once you’re in the forest, scavenging for scraps and making an entirely new life is quite satisfying. It’s hard to forget the first time you take down a deer or find a buried stash of supplies. The snowy setting is also compelling for survival, as it always feels like you’re one second away from disaster.
Being able to return to your wife and child in your shelter after a hard day of working in the snow makes the cabin feel extremely cozy, and you feel compelled to go out and collect supplies for their sake. The way models appear buried in snow when set outside is also a good touch.
The game’s building and cooking systems have surprising depth. Preparing ingredients, collecting fuel, and cooking food were fairly well created. Many building options are also available, which would be very pleasing for those interested in creating their own unique survival encampments.
Sadly, once I hit a certain point, surviving became a cakewalk, as supply stashes were always hidden just a walk away from my base. Additionally, there were never any crucial threats I was forced to deal with. Neither the frozen temperature, enemy soldiers, nor even harsh wildlife threatened me in my everyday routine, making the survival gameplay after the first few hours a breeze yet oddly unenjoyable with the lack of struggles.
Horrendous Story and Quests
At first, you must become accustomed to the base survival gameplay, completing quests and stories tied to rebuilding your animal farm and home base. After this, you begin some quests, such as following fellow soldiers and completing tasks around the map for them. These few quests mostly involve using the base survival mechanics to help out people in need.
Similar to the majority of this game, there is little depth here. Many of the stories are uninspired, with one breaking, so I couldn’t see the text that the abandoned soldier was supposed to say. Other than that quest, the only other quest is one where you help another surviving family. This questline also broke halfway through, as, for a while, the NPCs I needed to talk to vanished.
While the stories, the context behind them, and the entire game make sense, it feels like every element needs so much polish to be complete. There also is a lack of general story content to complete in the game itself. Additionally, as someone who loves World War 2 and its history, I find that this game barely takes advantage of it other than the initial explanation of the setting.
I’ll Make My Own Fun Then
Once I reached the end of these questlines, I told myself that to give this game the best chance, I’d do my best to give it a go, true survival game style, and make my own fun out of the chaos. And thus, I started walking in the opposite direction of where I had been going before.
In the wild, you’ll notice it becomes relatively easy to find wild deer, stags, and boars to hunt, as they seem to spawn in a perfect area around you as you walk. While you must be stealthy while hunting, stumbling across animals to kill for food isn’t hard.
As I walked around, I found a ditch in the ground that I dug supplies out of, and later found a fishing rod next to a pond. This all made me think, hey, this isn’t too bad. I scoured an abandoned building for supplies and continued to make my way in the wild, finding points of interest and enjoying the limited yet engaging exploration.
Then I stumbled upon something I’d been anticipating for a while: an enemy base. Sadly, this became one of the game’s greatest letdowns.
Utterly Broken
After stealthily approaching an enemy, lining up the shot, and firing directly into his skull, where a cloud of red mist appeared in conjunction, the enemy turned to look directly at me and started running. In combat, enemies run directly at you until they are a certain distance away, where they then stop to fire. Yet, your running speed is always greater than theirs, so you can just run away, fire as they are still approaching, and then run away again to reload, never even letting the AI go to an attack animation. Enemies are also much greater health sponges than expected, so this process repeats repeatedly if you try fighting an enemy.
While the utterly unfinished combat was the final nail in the coffin to me, this entire game is filled with lackluster AI, user interface, and user experience.
Often, the in-game text is broken, and the wording, which I assume is translated from another language, requires multiple glances to understand. There is no voice acting, but that’s okay because the dialogue spoken by NPCs is basic and bland regardless.
The way you complete a quest is entirely obtuse. You have to find out how to properly tick the box that you did whatever task you were supposed to. Although I luckily could complete almost everything independently without outside help, it would sometimes take multiple attempts and questioning frustration to realize, oh, I needed to place this in a specific box or click on this NPC to complete the quest.
Additionally, the user interface, like the stove cooking element, feels half-baked and needs more polish. To place wood in the stove, for instance, it took a few tries to realize that you can’t simply place the wood in the tab that says place wood here, but it has to be on the actual words themselves, or else it won’t transfer.
Visually, the game can look pretty good in the best circumstances, but at its worst, it reaches levels of jank lower than even the most unpolished Bethesda experience. NPCs sit in the air and have bad path-finding. Unappealing and, quite frankly, creepy textures and models litter this game.
Yet, what’s even worse than all this is how broken the game is on a deeper level. I ended up crashing a handful of times, and as I played, there were constant stutters and minor frame rate hiccups that seemed to grow and grow. The worst part is how long the load times are to enter the game. While fast traveling is very quick and seamless, I would often wait minutes for my saved game to load to get into the game itself, so after getting killed due to a falling tree to find out if it would hurt and later dying while testing the incomplete combat, I would have to withstand minutes of loads to further punish my actions.
A Farmer Who Doesn’t Farm?
The most heinous offense about Farmer’s Father: Save the Innocence is that farming isn’t even possible aside from the few animals you gain. There is no planting crops, watering soil, or harvesting plants at all in this experience. In a way, this means it doesn’t even live up to its title.
This game doesn’t have absolutely nothing going for it. It has many fascinating survival elements mixed with a unique story. While I wouldn’t say that this game is complete in its current state, if you enjoy these types of survival games or the previous game, Farmers Life, then possibly give this game a go if you’re interested. Sadly, I can say that otherwise, it may be best to give this experience a pass, at least until they fix the nonfunctional aspects.
