Review: Sugardew Island has promise, but it might just be purgatory repackaged

Sugardew Island is a farming game, plain and simple. Everything you do revolves around farming. To fill your shop, you have to grow the produce. To work toward the bigger goal in the game, you have to sell produce. Farming is all-consuming in this game.

If you love farming games and want nothing more from your playing experience, then Sugardew Island is perfect for you. But, if you yearn for more, you may want to skip this one.

Sugardew Island: Did it live up to the hype?

Sugardew Island starts with your character shipwrecking on the shores. It is inhabited by the Harmony Tree, forest folk, and nature spirits. There are smaller gnome-like forest folk who will come buy from your shop and human-sized nature spirits who will give you quests. Later, you will be able to romance the spirits.

The island used to be a place of harmony between forest folk and humans, but humans – as they so often do – became greedy and tried to take more than was their share. This deception created a magical response that caused the ground to tremble and split, emitting thorny vines that rapidly overtook the island making it uninhabitable to humans.

As the first human in an unknown amount of time, it’s up to you to bring harmony back to the land and heal the tree. You do that by accepting quests from the harmony tree. They’re simply fulfilling a quota of served nature spirits at your shop. If you need 50 harmony points to achieve that quest, then selling 50 vegetables in your shop will get you that.

The quests are laid out as islands: Bunny Island, Deer Island, etc. They each have 5 levels and will need greater numbers of sold items to complete them. By doing so, you’ll reap different rewards like expanding your seed catalog or upgrading your tools. Or, should I say, you can gain blueprints to upgrade your tools. It’s not obvious that it’s simply a blueprint, so I was very confused when I unlocked upgrades and they didn’t apply at first. You have to create them once they’re unlocked. That’s pretty standard for games, honestly, but I wish it had said that somewhere. 

Now that you know what you have to do, let’s talk about how easy or fun it is to achieve.

In terms of companionship, you’re pretty limited. You have Tomte – a forest folk who sells seeds and animals. There’s a jaded, mystical fox-like creature that lives in the Harmony Tree and dislikes you instantly. And, lastly, the four nature spirits who will only give you one-liners at the beginning. You talk to no one else.

As you complete quests for the nature spirits, you’ll open up more dialogue, but they want a random mix of produce that doesn’t give you any harmony for selling to them and harmony is kind of important early on to open up things.

Tomte offers you a house that used to be lived in by the previous humans and is suspiciously well-maintained. Along with the house, you’re given a barn, a storefront, and a wide expanse of farmland.

Here’s where things start to decline rapidly for me. You get up in the day, you hoe the land, sow the seeds, water the plants, put down fertilizer if you wish, and then wait. Your only other activity is to break rocks, cut down trees, and pluck weeds.

If your crops grow, you can harvest them and sell them in the store. But, that’s it, y’all. You wake up, spend most of your day watering plants, run the shop if you can, and repeat.

There’s very little in the way of customizing your character and not much more in customizing your island. There are some freedoms to create aesthetic patches of farmland, but it’s clear you’re here to farm and only farm.

This might be fine except the controls aren’t the best. And, what’s wild to me, is that the game flat-out acknowledges that it’s hard to focus on a certain plant. So, it wants you to hold the left trigger (on the controller, it’s different for the keyboard) to force the camera into straight lines: horizontal, vertical, and diagonal. It’s something you get used to, but it’s still not intuitive. 

I have to move like I’m playing Chess to farm accurately?

Add in that everything is one button press at a time and you’re just doing the same thing over and over and over… You plow the land one square at a time, you sow the seeds one at a time, and you water one at a time. There are upgrades that will up the squares affected by your tools, but you have to long hold to charge them. Honestly, it doesn’t feel natural after everything else just being a simple click. And if you don’t long press, it’ll just do one. Why doesn’t the upgrade just apply?

I know I mentioned it above, but I want to reiterate it here. When you’re doing quests, you’re told what your reward is. So, you can get an upgrade for the hoe and water can, an upgrade for the house, or an upgrade for your axe or hammer. It doesn’t say it’s a blueprint, so when I unlocked them, I just assumed they’d be applied. No, you have to have the materials and money to upgrade them in addition to finishing the quest.

Honestly, I wouldn’t have even blinked if I was told it was a blueprint, but when I thought it was automatic and told I needed to do more, it was a little irritating.

Getting money isn’t exactly an easy thing to do and you need it for everything. Plants take 3-5 days to grow, so you’re spending many of your days just watering your plants and bashing around in the forest. You can apply a quick fertilizer, but it only saves you one day, if that.

Fertilizer is made by combining two weeds, which is fantastic, but once you cleanse the land of weeds, it’s going to slow your production of fertilizer down and it’s a steep price to buy from Tomte when you have to buy in multiples. 

Weeds have never been so vital

You have quick fertilizer and water fertilizer. Honestly, as much as I loved having my plants grow quicker, it’s almost worth doing the water fertilizer because it’s so, frustratingly easy to forget to water. Using that fertilizer will keep your crops watered until they’re harvested, even ones that bear vegetables several times.

But, if you do that, you’ve got even less to do in a day. Then, it’s just whacking things in the forest.

And, since I mentioned it, let me just say that I hate the choices made for the soil color. I’ll admit that they’re true to real-life color, but the parched soil is so dark that it looks watered. Play pretty much any farming game and parched soil will look unnaturally pale and there’s a reason for it. It’s so you can tell it needs to be watered! I lost so many plants because I couldn’t tell at a glance.

The only indication you get that the plant is watered is it being a near black-brown color that’s only a few shades off from the parched soil. I have no clue why there isn’t a little effect on it like water droplets or something. The fertilizer has THREE indications that it’s there. You can physically see the fertilizer, it glows gold, and there are sparkle effects. Why isn’t there a more noticeable effect for, arguably, the most important part of the farming process?

Since we’re on a roll, let’s talk about the shop. When you finally get the spoils of your thousand-click labor, you pop it on a pedestal in the shop, and you open for business. The forest folk will come in, grab your items, and either come to the front to purchase them outright or haggle. 

Welcome to the shop, I’ll be at the register and only at the register the entire time

The haggling has three tiers. You can recommend the product to them and get the full amount of money, advise them on it and get the middle amount, or give them a discount that is basically like giving it to them for free. You’re supposed to get a separate benefit for doing this which I mistakenly thought might be more harmony, but no. I have no idea what giving them a discount does except… well, give them a discount.

You are fixed behind the counter while this happens. You cannot move. If you could move, I wouldn’t find this next bit to be so irritating, but since you can’t, I do. If you try to recommend or advise on the price, the forest folk might decide they don’t want it. At this point, they don’t put it back where they found it, they put it in a box near the front door.

You can’t access that box until AFTER the store is closed and you can only open once a day. Depending on how well the day went, half of your stock could be locked out from your daily sales because of this. You have to wait until tomorrow to try and sell them.

Wild. Why can’t I just grab the things and put them back on the shelf?

What else? I guess let’s talk about the uselessness of the barn and animal farming. I thought, initially, that you had to go through all of the island quests in the order that they’re presented before you can start the next island’s quests. So, when cows were the 3rd island’s reward, my flabber was a little gasted. But, that’s my bad. The game never told me that I had to go in order, but it never told me I didn’t either.

Learning that, I happily opened up my cow and welcomed the cutest little Cotton-Candy pink cow that I named Flossy. She hated me. You’re supposed to be able to feed your cow and when you do, they’ll give you something the next day, but there was no way to feed her. I suspect you’ll have to wait for her to request food, but I waited days and she never wanted anything. 

It’s okay, Flossy, I still love you

She’s supposed to eat wheat, but even holding wheat, she doesn’t take it. So, either my game was bugged, or you can only get products from your animals once every few days. This is not the money maker I was hoping it would be.

There are several animals that you can have, but keeping the food in stock to get milk only every so often just feels a bit unrewarding and like it’s not worth my time.

Lastly, let’s talk more about the animal islands because they might be the most useful, but even then, they’re not reliable. When you unlock levels in your islands by completing harmony quests, you unlock that animal. So, on Bunny Island, completing the first quests gave you a bunny. The second quest unlocked a second bunny, and so on.

Visiting the animals, it says they’ll give you seed packets if you pet them. Well, they do give you seed packets, but it’s sporadic. So, while it certainly helps, it’s not going to fund your crops. You’ll have to go to Tomte for your seeds and the upfront cost can be staggering.

Personally, I recommend getting the corn since it will bear produce three times. It drastically cuts down on work and you can put the water fertilizer on it so you can set it and forget it. But, if you do that, I really don’t know what you’ll do with your time.

I can see where the devs have said they wanted a stream-lined, easy-going gameplay experience, but for me, it was just pared back too much. There’s gorgeous water from a stream and an ocean, but it’s just there to look at. There are adorable seashells on the beach, but you can’t pick them up. 

Get in my pocket, sea shell. I must collect you.

It needs more. Clicking a mouse or hitting a button over and over just isn’t fun. I understand they put some romance elements into this, but I want more. Or for things to be less complicated. I don’t know.

If working the land is your favorite part of these types of games, you’ll love Sugardew Island. But, for me, it was just waking up, watering the plants, opening the shop, and then going to bed while I waited for crops to pop up. Day in, day out, the same.

If you want to give Sugardew Island a try, you can get it over on Steam for $16.99. If you’re a fan of games like this, you should check out our review of Bit Orchard. However, if you’re not looking for farming, check out the review we did of Smushi Come Home. It’s my constant feel-good game where you run around, helping out people, and have the freedom to explore.