“Crop” is described as a “Twin Peaks-style horror farm”, but it is not the kind of weird that makes you laugh with weird jokes, but the kind of gloomy that makes you feel something is wrong the more you play it. You crawl out of an overturned car at the beginning, you are in the forest, next to an abandoned farmhouse, and the first thing you do next is to bury the body of the previous farmer! At the same time, the village also puts pressure on you with crop quotas, forcing you to hold on between fear and labor.
Throwing you into an awkward situation right from the start
The protagonist, whose identity is unknown, climbs out of the back of an overturned vehicle and wakes up to find himself in a forest and near an abandoned farmhouse. What’s even more outrageous is that while disposing of the body of the previous farmer, you also have to face the pressure of crop quotas imposed on you by the village: you are not just here to farm, you are forced to work in fear by some invisible rules.
The strategy is not to speed up, but not to burn yourself to death
The farm itself looks eerily cute, but the land surrounding it is an overgrown, garbage-dump-like wasteland. Your physical strength is limited every day, so you have to clean up the waste, mow the grass, rake the grass into piles, move the compost, plow the ground, sow seeds, fertilize, and water, and then there is a possibility of harvesting. The trial description particularly emphasizes: Every action is strenuous, so how you allocate work throughout the day becomes very important. It’s not a comfortable farm for you to relax, unless you feel tension counts as healing.
The horror is not about jumping faces, but about “everyday mistakes”!
The horror comes more from the sense of unease and uncontrollability: triggering events such as digging up skulls; if pests get into the seedlings, the quality of the crops will decrease and the selling price will directly become a fraction; the weather is random, and cold rain may make you sick, making all actions more energy-consuming until you rest or get medicine. What’s more important is that you want to finish the farm work and at the same time you have to investigate what happened, because you obviously didn’t come here normally.
There is also drama between the village and the intelligence system: working during the day and meeting people privately at night
In addition to farm work, the game also has a village side narrative. You will meet at the villagers’ work place, or even meet secretly at night, listen to gossip, get intelligence, and then organize the fragmented clues into a system called Mind Root: like a network of nodes, it will track time-sensitive intelligence and remind you to deal with it in time. The example given in the demo is very strange: someone found an old Bible on the farm, which contained sentences such as “Blood can fertilize the land, and I can finally get a good harvest.” This directly led the farm management in the direction of rituals and sacrifices.
The test player also asked “Have you ever been in love?” and the answer was: This farm game is very different, and the protagonist is unlikely to fall in love in this situation. The existence of multiple endings and seasons is still unconfirmed, but at least the weather will randomly change between cloudy and rainy days. The overall goal is to make a narrative experience of about 15 hours: not to let you farm forever, but to use farming to push you to the end.