Sprout Valley is a cute farm sim where you step back from the busy city life to live out a low-stress life farming. Play as Nico, the sweet little cat character who just wants to live a peaceful life. Gather resources to improve your island life. Plant and harvest a variety of crops. Explore neighboring islands to collect resources and encounter random shops. There’s even some fun NPCs for you to encounter and get to know! 

Story, Audio, and Visuals

Sprout Valley is a pretty simple farming sim. There’s about 15 hours of story gameplay to play through, and it’s mostly farming and resource gathering. This isn’t a deep, story-rich farm sim like Coral Island, Stardew Valley, or Wylde Flowers. There is no exciting lore to infer or theorize about. What you see is what you get.

And I *love* that about this game. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the deep story games, too. It’s just that sometimes you want something simple; something that’s easy to pick up for a few minutes to play, then put it down to continue later down the road. And that’s what Sprout Valley is. It’s perfect for casual gaming. Its focus on farming and resource gathering lets me just mindlessly grow crops or harvest fruit, then go about my day as normal. 

Plus, the pixel art with its great color palette that isn’t too bright or bold is one of my favorite aspects. Paired with the audio that isn’t super memorable, but doesn’t overshadow anything, it’s a good combination. I enjoy playing Sprout Valley when I’m winding down for bed because it’s simple and easy to play, look at, and listen to. There’s no tension to raise my blood pressure, or spike my adrenaline and wake me up. Just chill music with some chill farming to relax me. 

Controls

The controls, on the other hand, are less than ideal. Sprout Valley seems to rely heavily on players having prior gaming knowledge, and especially prior farming sim/exploration knowledge to get controls and the idea of the game down. There isn’t really a tutorial and purpose right out the gate. Unfortunately, not everything feels intuitive. So even having played farm sims prior to picking up this one, it took time for me to figure out and get used to the controls. 

Crafting isn’t too bad, though. Sprout Valley even has multi-crafting, which a lot of games lack. You can select the number of items you wish to craft at the crafting table. However, ordering multiple items is a pain. There is no multi-ordering with a few clicks. You have to repeatedly click to get to the number of items you want to order. You want 100 carrot seeds? Click 100 times! Less than ideal, and slows down your dreams of creating that massive flourishing farm, but not game breaking. 

Final Thoughts

Despite the weird controls and lack of multi-ordering, I’ve really enjoyed Sprout Valley. It’s the perfect casual game. It’s adorable, relaxing, calming, and doesn’t have frustrating fishing mechanics or minigames. Nothing is overly complicated or too in your face. It’s laid-back and so cute. 

I give it

You can find this adorable game on Steam, Switch, Android, and iOS.