Sick of life in the densely populated core of civilization, you decide to gather your gear and head out to the unsettled wilderness for a life unbothered by others—closer to the land, the soil. So you get yourself ready to go, new overalls, new multi-use pickaxe, and a brand spanking new giant farming robot.
That’s the pitch for Lightyear Frontier, the upcoming cozy little farming and crafting sim with a mecha-sized twist. Stomping around an unexplored frontier world with your big robot, building up a farm full of amenities and decorations, and building up shed-fulls of equipment were all things I got to enjoy when I sat down with a rather generous preview build.
My key takeaway was that Lightyear Frontier is a sweet, calm game. Whether playing by yourself or with friends in co-op, there’s basically no reason, ever, to rush around. It’s a fundamentally nonviolent, low-pressure experience. The worst consequence to not doing something now is making more annoying work for yourself later—coincidentally not unlike the actual experience of gardening. Sure, you don’t have to rush to get those weed seeds drifting into the fields, but you’ll have to uproot all of it later if you don’t do it now.
Farming with a mech, for the record, was as much fun as I wanted it to be. There are plenty of cheeky nods toward the usually military leaning of the mecha as a whole: Your multipurpose brush-clearing chainsaw and spike-driving rock splitter is a terrifying implement, but nobody’s ever going to get hurt by your big stompy machine. It picks up and harvests stuff with a giant vacuum. It uses its jump jets to explore big rocks, not outmaneuver enemies. Even if you get your mech in a weird pickle and fall over, it just does this goofy rigid toppling that made me laugh pretty much every time.
Naturally, the military joke does go all the way to your gear: You plant seeds with a cannon that you can upgrade to lock-on and fire automatically at plots. You water with a hose that can be upgraded with a charge-up water ball blast like some kind of plasma cannon.
In fact, watering stuff really is the only time-sensitive task. The slow-life pace extends to the whole game, from the top speed of a mech overladen with mined metals to the rate of tossing materials into presses and grinders for processing: You could wait, but really just throw them in and come back tomorrow.
Because there’s plenty to explore while your crops grow. The various regions of your planet are overrun by some old pollution from weird alien ruins. I won’t talk about those much to avoid spoilers, but you gotta clean up if you want to get the natural resources you need to build out the farm. That means either plucking weird polluted invasive weeds or spraying off patches of mysterious goopy chemicals that rob the land of life.
Once done, you can help the wildlife regenerate faster by dedicating some of your farm’s produce to feed them—healthier, happier wildlife means more stuff comes back each day. The same applies to your existing regions: You’ll get more out of the land if you make sure that you’re putting something back into it.
The same applies to you, as well: A well-decorated and beautified farmstead means you get more and more bonuses every day when you wake up. I really liked how that felt, because often decorations get treated as a sideshow to the main event of farming in this kind of game. There’s also a real joy to busting out the grumbling path-laying tool to place new roads around your fresh buildings—plopping down big constructions after gathering all kinds of diverse materials just feels pretty good.
Speaking of which, I was surprised to find that Lightyear Frontier is as much an exploration-crafting game as it is farming. Ranging around and finding new materials to use by clearing up pollution and taking care of wildlife in far-flung areas is a big part of playing this, much like in the larger handmade regions of games like Subnautica or Grounded.
There’s a lot of that DNA in here, and it’s pretty exploration-focused. While wandering around you can find a lot of areas that are little ruins or natural spaces filled with stuff to discover, each of which is basically a little prop-hunt puzzle that will reward you with stuff to use while building later on. Unlocking new resources lets you upgrade your mech using the products like oils, metals, and crafted parts. Those upgrades let you reach new areas of the map, which have new stuff to unlock and new resources to tweak with, which let you get new unlocks, which let you reach new areas. I think you get what I mean.
With its chill pace and sense of laid-back humor, I think that Lightyear Frontier is really going to appeal to people and groups of friends who want something low commitment, and low pressure, to enjoy at the end of the day. Conversely, if you go in wanting to optimize and rush around you might feel like the core pacing of Lightyear Frontier is getting in your way.
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