Review: Bit Orchard: Animal Valley is what happens when cozy gaming goes original Game Boy

Booting up Bit Orchard: Animal Valley on a Nintendo Switch, or just Bit Orchard on Steam, you’re immediately brought back to the 1990s in green overlaid, pixelated visuals, chiptune audio and music, and surprisingly challenging gameplay. You’ve already sold me on that alone.

Bit Orchard: Animal Valley Gameplay and Controls

The game, as the name alludes to, starts you off as a new owner of an old apple orchard in this 8-bit world. While this, as mentioned, is an “old” orchard, there aren’t really any trees currently planted. That’s where the initial gameplay comes in.

You’re tasked with growing and cultivating your orchard, which takes quite a bit of time. Initially, I was placing them as good as I could muster in a row, which was, without a doubt, the worst lines I’ve ever made it my life. But, I eventually figured out that you can turn on a grid mode in the settings to make it much easier to organize them. 

Purchasing the apple seeds inside your home means that they’ll already be at your mailbox by the time you make it outside with speedy delivery that puts Amazon to shame. You plant the seeds, water them daily, and watch them slowly sprout and turn into full tress over roughly a full in-game week.

But, what are you supposed to do while you twiddle your thumbs and watch a full tree grow? Luckily, there is expansion of the orchard to be had. And some (really) light story elements about a ghost living on your orchard. 

As this game takes cues from other cozy games like Animal Crossing, the orchard ghost immediately made me think of Wisp. But, his story is different than the easily frightened ghost that you can find on Animal Crossing islands. Once you help him with the initial ask, he helps remove a giant tree that allows you to start expanding and seeing more sights. You can talk to him about some various items that you find through your travels, but that’s the extent that you get of any real plot or story in the entire game.

If you’re playing on console, make sure to grab the free DLC packs to keep you occupied, such as the Halloween, Christmas, and Tasks packs. Halloween and Christmas open up a couple of caves to the north with a lot of placeable goodies for decoration. But, the Tasks DLC is well worth your time.

The Tasks DLC opens up two entirely new map areas: the pond and the town. It offers a bunch of new townsfolk that need your help with apple-related requests, as well as some fishing. If this were a deeper game, it’d likely allow you to romance them all too, but alas, it’s not.

If you’re playing on Steam PC, you get all of these automatically, as well as the usually paid DLC to add Chickens to your orchard. Honestly, the price is worth it in any case for a real time sink.

The controls can be a bit janky at first, if you don’t know what you’re doing. For instance, trying to catch up to pet and befriend the rabbit and frog can be a nightmare if you don’t have a way to trap them on planted trees. Once you pet the rabbit enough times, it becomes your new pet and follows you around the orchard. As for the frog? I’m 10 hours into the game and still can’t catch it, so I do not know what it offers other than marking off a task.

Art and Sound

I come from an era of gaming where the simplest pixel art was all you needed for a game to be fun and get your attention. So, seeing the Game Boy aesthetic of Bit Orchard: Animal Valley was so nostalgic and cozy for me. This coziness was amplified by the chiptune music coming from my speakers during the game to bring me back to the 1990s.

If you grab the Deluxe Theme DLC pack, the classic “Game Boy Green” background overlay gets some new options. I went with a nice light purple tone for a chunk of my playthrough, but the colors can sometimes transition themselves. Not sure if that’s a bug or a feature, but it wasn’t super distracting when it happened. It’s a free DLC on consoles and comes built directly into the PC version of the game.

All in all, the characters are minimalistic, the art is cute, the music wasn’t annoying, and I had a good time all around. So, no complaints here.

Coziness and Cons

In the grand scheme of things, I don’t have a lot to complain about for the core gameplay of Bit Orchard: Animal Valley. It sets out to be a cozy Game Boy-style game and achieves that in droves (or is it groves?).

My main qualm with the game is that it, as mentioned, takes cues from Animal Crossing: New Horizons (and its prior installations) and fails to give you much reason to play after a certain point.

My ACNH playthrough has well over 1000 hours of playtime, which gave me so much customization and replayability. Bit Orchard, on the other hand, just wants you to plant more trees, get sprinklers and scarecrows, rinse, and repeat, to infinitum. It gets old faster than I would have liked, after completing all of the villager tasks. But, for the super low cost of entry, that’s honestly alright and gave me something to do for a couple days.

Romance, as I mentioned earlier, is another qualm that felt missing in Bit Orchard. Most farming sims allow you to find love with townsfolk. Bit Orchard’s DLC introduces quite a few interesting characters that felt like they should have been able to be romanced, such as the shopkeeper girl that related to the actual plot of the game, the fisherman, the music loving woman, or even the single dad. 

Sadly, when you fill up their heart meters from doing their tasks, all you get is resources and minigames within their homes. It felt like a missed opportunity to have them hangout at the orchard eventually, even if it didn’t offer any additional purpose.

Aside from the initial setup of getting your controls and grid settings correctly, as well as figuring out the best methods for your day and night cycle (you can change the speed that days go by), this game is all-in-all fun and a great way to waste a day or two for much lower than the cost of a movie ticket.

Final Verdict

I really like Bit Orchard: Animal Valley. It’s nostalgic and harkens back to classic gaming. The developers, 2Boone Games, learned how to make a simple game for cozy fans that feels like a side story of Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons without all of the extra story bulk. 

If you’re looking for a cozy farming game that’ll keep you occupied for short bursts, I highly recommend Bit Orchard. You can find it on the Nintendo Switch (where I played it), Xbox, and Steam PC. If you pick it up for its usual $6.49 price tag on console, make sure you go through and grab each of the DLC for it. Most of them are free.

If this game doesn’t seem your speed, you can look at other reviews we’ve done on farming sim games.