Get Your Hands Dirty
Put your harvesting skills to the test. Don the mantle of Princess Farmer and nip the Gummy invasion in the bud in the story-driven, match-3 puzzle game Princess Farmer. Developed by Samobee Games and published by Whitethorn Games, Princess Farmer tasks players with digging up veggies and making chains of combos to thwart a mysterious bunny. Do you have what it takes to uproot the pesky forces plaguing the realms?
How Does Your Garden Grow
Princess Farmer opens with a colorful, nostalgia-inducing shelf full of VHS tapes and figurines of its characters. Selecting the first tape in the collection launches the story’s first episode. The game cuts to a tv screen as the tape plays.
Our anthropomorphic bunny hero stands near a bulletin board in a lush forest. Move your character by dragging your finger to the left or right. You can interact with objects by tapping the exclamation mark icon in the bottom right corner of the screen when prompted. Her friend Nancy’s bulletin board message requests that our fuzzy protagonist harvest the veggies from the community garden.
A menu of responses appears. Scroll through the available dialogue by swiping up and down and select your choice by tapping. Hop on over to the garden and dig up veggies by swiping up, then deposit them in the wheelbarrow by swiping down. While reaping, you discover a peculiar lipstick buried in the ground. After pocketing the newfound makeup, you’ll head home and quickly fall asleep.
With our protagonist slumbering, we enter their dream and find the bulletin board from earlier in the day. After reading the shockingly legible message (words are notoriously indecipherable in dreams), Mother Gaia appears. She explains that the mysterious cosmetic we discovered earlier is actually one of the Royal Guardian charms—the Royal Lipstick of Strength!
After bestowing the title of Princess Farmer upon our rabbit, Mother Gaia becomes our mentor and introduces us to the basics of our powers. As the tutorial begins, Mother Gaia instructs us to harvest and match at least three veggies to chain combos and complete requests. Matches can be made horizontally, vertically or even diagonally, and Princess Farmer can carry up to five veggies at a time.
Yer a Guardian, Rabbit
With the tutorial completed, Princess Farmer awakens, transported to her new cottage in the Valley—Mother Gaia’s realm. Gaia explains that the Earth is in danger, and it’s up to us to protect the produce and provide for those in need. Following a quick Sailor Moon-style transformation, Princess Farmer enters the forest beyond her home.
Gaia gifts us the Wonderbun—a technological marvel that displays our score and goals for each level. This device automatically appears in the upper left corner of the screen at the start of each match. After completing a gauntlet of matches, Mother Gaia recommends that Princess Farmer rest and resume her duties tomorrow. Leave the forest and enter PF’s home to end the episode.
At the conclusion of each episode, players will find a summary of their achievements, brief letters from featured characters and heart rewards. Players can later exchange hearts for cosmetics in Rowan’s shoppe. With the episode completed, the VHS tape ejects itself, and we return to the shelf menu.
A Bountiful Harvest
Princess Farmer is chocked full of content. Beginning with episode two, the game allows you to choose between three different play styles—action bunny, puzzle bunny and balanced bunny. Action bunny features flashy gameplay that make combos easier without having to plan your moves. Puzzle bunny is for thinkers who would rather make thoughtful matches without worrying about speed. Finally, balanced bunny marries the best of both modes—play fast or thoughtfully whenever you like. You’ll receive the same rewards and experience the same story no matter which style you choose.
There’s also a Quick Play mode, which players can access via the tape resting above the nine main episodes. Quick Play challenges players to conquer a series of levels based on four requests from the game—survive, storm, endless and timed score. You can choose from a nice mixture of stage designs, should you have a favorite from the episodes.
Most of the Quick Play modes do what they say on the box. Survive challenges players to survive Grumpy Block (the rising stage) as long as possible. Endless features an endless level. Timed score asks players to score the most points within a minute. Storm requires players to weather the storm battle as long as possible by making matches and keeping Grumpy Block away.
Seeds of Success
While you’ll amass a ton of hearts through regular play, there’s a trove of currency waiting elsewhere. Earn hearts via daily quests, accessible from the Quests section of the main menu. You’ll have three rotating goals to accomplish each day, which yield different amounts of hearts based on the task. You’ll also accrue hearts by completing objectives on the Total Goals meter. After hitting two, four and eight daily goals, you’ll earn 1K, 3K and 5K hearts, respectively. Obtain five stars by completing twelve total daily goals.
Stars are the most lucrative currency in the game. They unlock rarer hare dyes, sparkles and outfits from Rowan’s shoppe. Players unwilling to invest time into daily goals may purchase bundles of stars for real-world cash. I certainly felt tempted to shell out for the cosmetics, as there’s a vast variety of color palettes, glittery sparkle effects and trendy costumes to own.
Pretty Bunny Guardian
Truly, I cannot recommend Princess Farmer highly enough. With story-driven games, you know you’re in for plenty of dialogue, which could feel like a chore to slog through. However, Princess Farmer never veered into that territory. Instead, the developers used every moment to not only further the story but enrich its world and characters with plenty of snappy, funny and heartwarming moments. The more I played, the more the game grew on me, thanks to the development team’s clever use of pop culture.
Princess Farmer feels so much like protagonist Bee from Bee and Puppycat that I couldn’t help but like her. This animated reference is further complimented by the sick lo-fi soundtrack courtesy of Astra, which kept me calm during harder matches. Clearly, somebody watched a lot of anime, and I loved to see it. The witty play on Tuxedo Mask and Who’s-that-Pokémon-style bumpers before and after ad breaks never failed to amuse and helped make the ads tolerable.
It’s refreshing to see such a well-crafted game so confident in its references and rooted in an unapologetically queer identity. While this might turn some players off, those who stick around will no doubt unearth a garden teeming with life.
