Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch (reviewed), PC
As I’ve gotten older I’ve found that my gaming tastes have changed quite a bit. I used to be more into story-driven games full of action, but in recent years, I find myself gravitating towards more “wholesome” experiences that just allow me to turn my brain off a bit. So when I saw Bit Orchard: Animal Valley was supposed to be a cross between Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, I knew I had to check it out.
Bit Orchard starts like so many other games in the genre, with your nameless character sick of the city life. So they decide the best course of action is to move to the country and start their very own apple orchard.
As you arrive at your new orchard, you’ll start with just one tree on your land. Once that tree bears fruit, you can sell it and use the money to buy more seeds. Now your goal is to plant seeds to build up your orchard and make more money. As trees start growing, they will produce three types of apples: normal apples, big apples, and rare golden apples. These each sell for different amounts, apples for $5, big apples for $15, and golden apples for $100.
Once money starts rolling in, you’ll be able to spend it on a few different things. By using the phone in your house your character can order seeds or sprinkler parts. There is also a section for construction that will allow you to buy cosmetic improvements for the orchard and, more importantly, expand your orchard, giving you room to plant even more trees.
There is also a bit of crafting in Bit Orchard. And by a bit, I mean you can craft literally two different items. If you have sprinkler parts, you can make a sprinkler. If you collect enough fiber (by cutting down weeds around the orchard), you can craft a scarecrow. The sprinklers can save you some time by watering your seeds. They will also water full grown trees as well, which I assume increases the odds of getting big or golden apples, but that’s never actually confirmed. I found the scarecrows to be rather pointless because, while there are plenty of crows flying around, they never actually seemed to eat my apples.
Expanding your orchard also opens up a couple of new areas. The first is an area with a lake where you’ll receive a fishing pole and then gain the ability to fish. This also unlocks the Fish-O-Dex, which keeps track of the different fish caught. Unfortunately, there are only seven or eight unique fish and each sells for next to nothing, so while the fishing mechanic was implemented well enough, I didn’t find much reason to get into it.
The other area you can open up is a little town. The main draw here will be a shop that you can visit. It offers up some new outfits for your character to wear and decorations for your orchard that you can buy. In town you’ll also encounter a handful of characters that will give you some quests to complete. While having some objectives was nice, the overall small amount of quests and lackluster rewards for completing them was kind of a bummer.
On the topic of objectives, when the game starts, you’ll be given a list of tasks to complete. These include things like selling a number of apples, planting a certain number of trees, among other things. These were a nice way to give you things to work towards, but after you complete about three or four lists, they just disappeared. Adding in more tasks would have gone a long way in keeping me engaged in this game for longer.
Another issue I had came in the form of the in- game timer. Days start at 7 a.m. and end at midnight, with each hour lasting about ten seconds. Early on, l was finding so little to do on most days that I was going to sleep very early. However, as my orchard started growing, I found that once I collected all my apples the day was usually more than halfway done. Even worse, when I started opening new areas, I found that by the time I got to them, I had little time to do much. One positive here is that there’s no penalty for working all the way up to midnight, which was a necessity, otherwise this game might have been unplayable.
As far as visuals and audio go, both of these were a bit hit or miss for me. Obviously, whether or not someone will like the visuals is subjective. For me personally, the more I played, the less I liked looking at this game. It was far more tolerable when playing in handheld mode on Switch, but it was particularly hard on the eyes on a big screen. When it comes to audio, I will say that the sound effect of harvesting an apple was pretty satisfying. Everything else was just sort of the simple, 8-bit style sound effects you’ve heard before. There are also six different music tracks you can pick from. While a few of these were pretty good in short bursts, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to any of them on a loop and ended up turning the music off altogether.
When I really think about my time with Bit Orchard, it really is a tale of two halves. When I first started it, I was really into the gameplay hook of growing trees to get more money to grow more trees, all while working towards finishing tasks. Unfortunately, once I started to expand my orchard and days began feeling way too short and I ran out of tasks, it all started to feel very tedious. By about three hours in, I had already bought all the upgrades for my orchard and house, caught every fish, and finished every task and side quest. About the only thing I had left to do was collect all of the outfits, and I honestly had no desire to do that.
Bit Orchard: Animal Valley isn’t terrible, but it left a lot to be desired. Maybe I expected too much out of this budget title, but after just a couple hours, I was left with a slightly sour taste in my mouth. It started off strong, but petered out pretty quickly. It gave me little reason to keep coming back to the orchard, and that’s kind of a nail in the coffin for a game in this genre. If you’ve already played most of the other life-sim/farming games available and want something new or you can get it for $2 (like I did), then it might be worth checking.out. Otherwise, I’d recommend spending a few extra dollars on something like Stardew Valley that will give you far more bang for your buck.
