Monster Harvest is a farming sim with some twists by developer Maple Powered Games and publisher Merge Games. You get to a quiet town where your grandfather continues to be researching the effects of Slime on crops to create planimals. You farm and forage to make a living while learning more about this phenomenon and also the sketchy corporation that has moved in across the street from exploit this discovery.
Monster Harvest wears its influences strongly on its sleeves. Clearly inspired by Stardew Valley and Pokèmon, I’d be remiss not to say upfront: this game resides in the cisco kid of giants. The entire premise, arriving within this small town and farming on your family’s land is straight out of Stardew as the rogue-like dungeon and planimal collecting and fighting elements are certainly Pokèmon-like. However, neither aspect of the game is fully realized or unique enough to create this game stand out. Monster Harvest isn’t bad at all, but it seems like I’ve done this all before.
On the farming side, it’s an easy and familiar pattern. Every day you've got a set amount of energy to use in chopping wood, mining minerals, building things, and tending to your crops. An efficient player will go back and forth from your farm towards the town, separated annoyingly by a park of sorts in between, buying up seeds as often as easy to plant across your vast tract of land to maintain an income stream as well as improve your planimal army.
Planimals, so-named because they are plant-animal hybrids, are born whenever you imbue different plants with different types of Slime, as acquired by slaying Slimes which have escaped from dungeons. Once they’re fully grown and harvested, they’ll follow behind you and jump into battle on your behalf when you go spelunking within the game’s rogue-like dungeons. Adding the planimals mechanic truly does add an additional element for your farming routine, which will help because the routine is sort of monotonous until you level up and unlock means to automate some of the growing.
The dungeons start off very hard. Just one planimal can fight your battles at a time in a one-on-one fashion similar to classic Pokèmon battles. You have a few moves you can command them to use, but all but the first need to be unlocked by leveling up. There’s no strategy really though to these battles. It just turns quickly into a mashing of buttons quickly before you either win or lose and hope you gain enough experience along the way to gain levels, heal, and survive another encounter. It does get easier while you level up, but that takes time and patience. The dungeons do provide opportunities for finding a variety of material for constructing and decorating your house, which provides an additional incentive to exploring beyond plot progression.
The game’s biggest asset is its visuals. The pixel art is gorgeous, specifically for the environments. The trees are colorful and also the buildings feel lived-in. I only wish the smoothness sprites felt exactly the same way. Some of the people you meet are alright too, but your own sprites feel underdeveloped and a mismatch for that gorgeous world you inhabit. This reaches the townspeoples’ personalities too. Perhaps there might be more exciting dialogue much later in the game, however for a game having a Stardew or Animal-Crossing-like friendship mechanic, none of the townspeople particularly interested me either in their visuals or their dialogue.
If you want farming sims with a slow on-ramp plus some unique additional mechanics, including monster collecting/fighting and residential renovation/decorating, Monster Harvest is certainly going to be enjoyable for you. Especially if you’ve overstayed your time and effort in the games that offer their greatest influences to Monster Harvest and therefore are searching for new things. Its mechanics and worlds are set just far enough apart that you won’t entirely seem like you’re retreading exactly the same paths. But if you’re looking for a new experience that shines by itself and it has sharp and fully realized mechanics, this is probably not going to be it. It’s a decent game, but when you’ve ever stayed playing its predecessors, you’re going to have a problem not constantly comparing it for them given precisely how closely nearly everything about the game resembles them.
At no more your day, Monster Harvest is a good game that the little too closely resembles Stardew Valley and doesn't execute its Pokèmon-like mechanics cleanly or uniquely enough. Fortunately, it’s mostly visually beautiful with nice music and most plenty to complete.
Monster Harvest is available now on Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.
