Gleaner Heights is a peanut butter and Jalapeno jam game,  where the genre is the foundation for a different theme. Farming sims will be paired with anything: you live in the woods, and you farm, you are a witch, and you farm, and you are a witch vampire, and you farm. Gleaner Heights is for maybe five people that overlap with “I sure do love director David Lynch’s three season with a prequel movie series Twin Peaks” with “wow, it sure is fun to collect chicken eggs”, and I’m proud to be one of them. The references are often deliberate, with certain village characters and locations acting as stand-ins for ones found in Twin Peaks. Akin to the first Deadly Premonition, a game about playing as a not-Agent Dale Cooper who just so happens to find himself in a weird Washington state town, Gleaner Heights is most interesting when it reveals its hidden giant crabs and demon possessions among its deliberate Twin Peaks illusions. 

Uncovering those secrets requires farm work and those grapes are not going to water themselves (granted, in Gleaner Heights, this is only a matter of when instead of “would be nice”). Like a tired comparison about having to eat only when the entire family’s food has arrived from the kitchen, so too does Gleaner Heights mandate farming before world building and story development. Now, unlike Graveyard Keeper, Gleaner Heights paces its reveals out amongst its seasonal festivals and trips to the seed store (a farming sim pacing issue that sits inside the beating heart of this article) yet waiting is waiting. Its DLC called Season 2 seems to be aware of this second audience and appears to speak directly to me on its Steam ‘about’ page. After a list of animal and romance updates, the page t addresses those wild people who care about the plot of a game, where most of the gameplay is using a watering can and filling a food trough.  

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life started this compulsion, with the remake uncovering it from underneath the historical earth. A Wonderful Life is about the slow progress of time and secretly about how working on a farm rapidly ages a person. Yet a game about raising a child to adulthood sure becomes uneventful after a few seasons. I never finished the original as a kid, finally giving up around the point my red-headed prodigy became a teenager. The remake cleans up a lot of the original’s clumsy inputs (farming used to be so physically difficult, I never even bothered, like deciding against fishing in a River King game). Unfortunately, while these QoL changes are appreciated, it frees up time for…nothing. Modern sensibilities and my years with the genre meant that the farm was on top of the hill by the halfway point. Machines were bought to check them off a list, not because they were necessary investments. A villager needed maxed friendship for an item, I was knocking on their bedroom door moments before they woke up. A villager requires a carp for a trade, I had already fished dozens. No, I refuse to get good at the firework twins’ mini game. 

Farming sims always need to be assigning game length projects or put an earlier ending halfway between where they think someone would need to complete the game. I tend to tire of video games faster than most, though I’m expected to stretch the first deeply engaging ten to fifteen hours of these games out multiple times past their enjoyment. There comes a point in every single farming sim where I want to close the book, so I resort to what I call “Waking Up To Go Back to Sleep”; an unnerving practice of sending my farmer to literally sleep through the remains of their life. But, like the coffee table my cat cannot stop knocking her head into, so too will I find myself walking into another farm sim’s pastoral embrace. Pray I find a way to escape.

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