Everdream Village Preview: A Promising and Addictive Farming Sequel

A few years ago, I reviewed a cozy farming adventure game called Everdream Valley. Despite some of its flaws, I enjoyed it. So when I saw that a sequel, Everdream Village, was coming out, I knew I had to get it. I did just that – and despite being in Early Access, I once again had a great time playing this game. It’s not perfect, but this is understandable given its current status.

Also, strangely enough, even though there is more content yet to come and there are a few minor bugs here and there, Everdream Village already feels like an improved version of Everdream Valley. If you’re curious to find out how this sequel is better and if it’s worth getting in Early Access, let’s discuss my experience playing in more detail.

Everdream Village is now available in Early Access on Steam for $19.99.

Story – Establishing a New Village

In Everdream Valley, you played as a youngster staying with their grandparents on their farm, helping with chores and exploring the world. Everdream Village takes place six years later, continuing with the same protagonist. This time, you’ve moved to an island with your parents, and your grandparents are there, too. Together, you set out to establish a new village on the island by inviting other people to move in. It’s a similar setup to Animal Crossing, but a little more involved.

A Friendly Cast of Characters, New and Old

Returning characters include the magical witch’s cat, who provides some guidance, as well as comic relief, to the player. The merchant also makes a comeback, providing a host of useful wares to purchase.

There are some interesting new characters to meet as well, such as the banker struggling to look after animals on a ranch, two feuding sisters (a miner and a smith), a friendly woodcutter, the protagonist’s city-slicking fish-out-of-water friend, and an overenthusiastic lumberjack.

Yay, our snarky cat friend is back!

More Characters to Come Later

As Everdream Village is in Early Access, the quests aren’t bottomless. Once you move everyone into the village and complete their quests, there’s nothing more to do until the next update is released.

However, having just a few characters to get to know to begin with actually works better. You don’t feel overwhelmed with a mountain of quests by lots of different characters. You can focus on getting to know these friendly faces first, get them established in your village, and look forward to the next batch of characters coming soon.

Two Islands (So Far), One Adventure

Let’s talk about the locations in Everdream Village. To start with, you have not one, but two islands to explore. There’s the main island, similar in appearance to the world in Everdream Valley, with its flowery fields and lush towering trees – except there’s a beach this time! There’s also a few mountains to climb. Then there’s a desert island, which looks completely different with its dry conditions, dead trees, cactus, and mines, as well as new animals to find.

Exploring both these islands were fun, making new discoveries. And we’ll be getting more islands in later updates, so it’ll be interesting to see what else there will be to explore in Everdream Village.

Gameplay – A Bigger and Better Farming Adventure

In many ways, the gameplay of Everdream Village is similar to its predecessor, which makes sense giving that it’s a farming adventure game. However, there are new elements that have been welcomed into this entry – and some that have not returned, but for the better.

No More Annoying Dream Mini-Games!

We’ll start with something that hasn’t returned from Everdream Valley: no dream mini-games! If you’re not familiar with these, every time your character went to sleep, you would spin a wheel, which would randomly pick a mini-game for you to play, whether you wanted to do it or not. These mini-games include horse racing – and those dratted fireflies!

Annoyingly, completing these dreams were sometimes necessary for fulfilling a quest task. It didn’t help that these dreams sometimes were buggy, like the notorious firefly mini-game (to be fair, they were fixed in patches, but still…) 

Anyhow, these mini-games are not present in Everdream Village. Sleeping is completely optional, and it just skips to 7am the next day and autosaves your game.

Everdream Village does have some mini-games, but the dream ones are no more.

You Can’t Have a Farming Game Without Farming

We’ll now talk about what is in Everdream Village, starting with returning gameplay. Since this is technically a farming game, naturally this gameplay from Everdream Valley carries over. You can grow and harvest crops, and also raise animals.

Although this game is in Early Access and more content is to come soon, you are spoiled for choice on crops to grow and animals to care for. You can grow tomatoes, corn, turnips, carrots, pumpkins, and potatoes. With animals, there are cows, sheep, llamas, horses, donkeys, rabbits, pigs, bison, and goats. Plus, you can find some adorable kittens!

Growing crops is easy. You just establish a patch of garden, plant the seeds, water, and after a few days, it’s ready for harvesting. There’s nothing needlessly complicated.

With animals, you can keep them in a pen like the previous game, although this is mainly only if you plan to breed them. Otherwise they can roam free around your farm.

Gardening is an easy, relaxing, and lucrative pastime in Everdream Village.

Some Things to Know About Crops and Animals

While this is all pretty straightforward, there are some hiccups. Although selling crops is a lucrative way to make money, characters you sell to like the merchant don’t have a limitless supply of money, so they can only buy so much off you at a time. Saying this though, at this stage, you don’t need thousands to survive.

When it comes to animals, when you herd them over to your farm to officially become part of your livestock, they don’t show up on the map, which makes it difficult to locate them.

Also, the breeding process, while not that overcomplicated, isn’t that clear to begin with. You pair the animals up you want to breed, but then it doesn’t tell you the animals need to be well-fed to actually produce babies. Also, they’ll continue spawning offspring until you remove the matched parents from the breeding sign in the pen, so you might accidentally end up with a ton of offspring.

Breeding’s a little more complicated, but not a nightmare task.

Crafting, With Added Fun

Once again, you can craft items at a workbench, where you need to gather certain resources. However, this game changes it up from Valley. When you first craft something, you must manually put it together. Notably, these are chairs, tables, and a sailing boat (more on that later!) You only need to do this once for an item, and then you can instantly build it next time, but the option to do the mini-game again is also there, which I appreciate.

Putting these pieces together in a puzzle format is good fun, and although it is for the most part easy, it’s also satisfyingly challenging. You have to work out what goes where by studying the reference images provided – and it’s not always that obvious! Although so far we only have 3 items to manually craft, I look forward to seeing this feature used more in future updates.

So far, you can craft a few items, but they provide a good challenge.

Exploring the World

Everdream Village, like its predecessor, is an open-world game. There are no loading screens, except for when you first load the game. You are totally free to go wherever you like – once you fix the broken bridge on the main island. The main island feels bigger than the one from Everdream Valley. It also feels a little more varied in its landscape. There are even mountains to climb, and beaches!

Also, another non-returning feature that was annoying in the first game are those blasted psycho geese. They are nowhere in sight, so you are free to explore without the worries of being ambushed by a rogue animal. Even the bears are friendly!

As you travel around, you can gather resources such as wood by hacking away at trees. Do it too many times though and the tree tumbles down. The tree doesn’t magically disappear either, at least not straight away; when it falls, it remains there – and you can’t chop it up for more wood!

You can also hunt for bugs such as butterflies, as well as bees. In this game, bees seem to be less hostile. At least I never got ambushed by bees and had to use a first-aid kit. Either I got lucky or they’ve done away with this feature as well.

There’s a whole world out there to explore.

A Question of Quests

Quests make a return to Everdream Village. These work similarly to Valley, where you speak to a character who has something for you to do. This can be anything; talking to another character, gathering enough of a resource, building something, traveling to a location, herding animals, etc. The quests are varied, not just with the tasks themselves, but the difficulty of the quests. Some are quick and easy, others take much more time, work, and patience.

You can have multiple quests going on at the same time, which is useful for keeping yourself busy, especially if you are stuck on one quest or unable to progress (such as waiting for a crop to grow or a character to perform a task).

The quests are fun and satisfying to complete. You aren’t spoon-fed all the information you need to complete them, but I prefer this in a way because it’s much more satisfying when you work it out for yourself.

You can also choose which active quests you want to track. They can’t all be listed at the same time, but it does make it easier when you can only see up to 3 quests on your screen, giving you more focus. The quests never time out, so there’s no pressure to complete them.

Quests are completely optional in Everdream Village. If you’re happy running around and doing your own thing, that’s fine. The main benefit for quests is unlocking new features, new animals, and new locations.

You can choose which quests to keep track of, to help you focus.

I Am Sailing… to Another Island!

One of the biggest selling points of Everdream Village is the ability to sail across the sea to other locations! It’s a big step-up from Everdream Valley, making the world feel much bigger and giving you even more freedom in exploring and adventuring.

At the moment, you can only travel between two islands, but more is to come later. However, the best part is you are in total control of the boat. Similar in vein to other open-world adventures like Tchia, you are free to take command of your sailboat and cross the sea as you please. The boat is pretty easy to control; you hop in and out, docking by sailing up onto the beach. The boat is propelled by the sails in a surprisingly-realistic way. Sometimes you have to adjust the angle of the boat to make it go faster.

It is very relaxing when you’re in the sailboat. It’s just you and the open waters. When you near the desert island, the sky changes to a beautiful sunset. It’s simply gorgeous.

The sailboat is a welcome addition in Everdream Village.

Mining and Smithing

In Everdream Village, you’re introduced to two new characters, in which come two new activities: mining and smithing. You can chip away at rocks to gather stone and ore, and then use ore at a forge to melt them into iron ingots, a new resource.

Mining is easy, but forging is more satisfying yet. It’s a bit of a process, but a fun one and not too difficult once you know how it works. You have to light the fire, get it going until the temperature is hot enough, and then add as many ores as you like. You have to wait two in-game hours for the process to finish, and then wait for the smith to remove the ingots and place them ready for collection. It’s a little bit fiddly, but I actually don’t mind this.

So long as the smith is around, you can procure iron ingots.

Cool Features Yet to Come

As established already, Everdream Village isn’t yet complete, meaning not all features are available right now, or are incomplete. For one, there is a character creator, but it is at the moment limited. 

Also, there is meant to be the ability to enter buildings, but this isn’t available at all yet. There are a few other features that have yet to be expanded on or even present in the game, but for now, there’s plenty of stuff to do to keep you busy for a while.

You can’t enter any buildings yet.

Graphics & Audio – Charming to Look At and Listen To

Everdream Village carries over the same cutesy, cartoony art style from Everdream Valley, but this game looks even better. You have the beautiful flowery fields, the lush greens and oranges of the trees, the calming blue waters. There’s also the animals, which are just so adorable to look at.

I should note the skyboxes used in Everdream Village. They do match the aesthetic of the game, and I like how they shift in appearance and lighting when traveling between the two islands. However, there is no day/night cycle. It’s always daytime (or sunset on the desert island). For practical reasons, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is a bit jarring when it’s the middle of the night and it’s still light. This might change in a future update though.

There’s also the music. I can’t complain too much. Again, it’s similar to the first game, matching the cozy, dreamlike, carefree theme. It’s nice to listen to, but there isn’t a huge amount of variety. There is a shift when visiting the beach or the desert island, but otherwise you’ll find yourself listening to the same soundtrack over and over. However, it’s pleasant to listen to and not an overly-annoying earworm.

Everdream Village was previewed on PC via Steam with a key kindly provided by Wire Tap Media.