Don’t do the crime of not growing the Thyme
Super Farming Boy is here! Coming to you from developer LemonChilli Soft and published by Renxo Europe Limited. With a mix of action, puzzle solving and of course farming, Super Farming Boy is a farming simulator like no other.
You play as Super, a young boy whose friends and family have been kidnapped and his powers stolen by the evil entity known as Korpo. In order to get them back, you must earn enough to buy them from Korpo.
And so you get to work, growing and harvesting the existing crops left on your farm. The crops themselves don’t generate as much income as you would expect for a farming game, that is unless you make use of the combo system. When picked, each crop will hit a specific square or squares near it and trigger a chain reaction if you position them just right, and the longer the combo, the more money it makes. On your first day you have to make do with what is already planted, but after that you should have made enough to visit the seed shop and buy some different plants. Each plant type hits differently, allowing you to make some incredibly long combos, for instance, corn always hits the square to its right, tomatoes hit the squares directly above and below them and eggplant hits those to the left and right of them. These are just the easy ones, there are many others with some very different patterns that require you to get creative with your chains. The hit pattern of the plants will be shown when you are buying them, along with information on what time of the day they grow and if they only grow once or regrow after picking.
Before you can start experimenting with your combos though, you will have to clear some room on your farm. Rocks and weeds litter the ground, as well as items you can pick up to sell. These vary depending on the season but they are quite valuable and often make you more money than your crops early on. Once you have cleared a space, you then need to till the ground before you can plant anything, which means you need to buy the power to transform your hands into a hoe from Korpo. Each time you go to sleep Korpo will appear and take everything you have collected that day in exchange for coins, then he gives you the choice to buy your powers and friends back. Most of your level 1 abilities are bought with coins, but upgrading them will cost a little extra, usually materials that can be found on your farm. Some materials are easy to obtain once you have your level 1 abilities, though others are not as common as wood and rock as they only appear in certain seasons and take much longer to acquire the amounts needed.
As well as your powers, you can also buy your helpers from Korpo. Time moves fast in Super Farming Boy, the days and nights come and go quickly and each season is only 15 days long, so small tasks like watering your plants and cutting weeds take up your much needed time. You also have an energy bar that depletes with every action you take, if you run out of energy you will pass out and the day ends. On top of that, just to rub salt in the wound, you will be charged a rescue fee. There is a vendor a short distance from the seed shop that sells different foods that will return varying portions of energy to you automatically when your energy bar drops too low.
Despite the surprising depth of management in the game, Super Farming Boy doesn’t take itself seriously at all. From the seasons to your helpers to even the plants themselves, the game is heavy with light-hearted and chaotic fun. The seasons are mostly unique with their resources and challenges, such as the radioactive season where you have to avoid radiation storms until you can buy the umbrella upgrade and the material you can spend is radioactive fungus. After the first year pests start to appear, little red imps that eat your crops but hide when you get near them. The only way to get rid of them is to hit them with crop combos, this is also the way to deal with huge obstacles that appear on your farm, giant boulders, volcanos, even piles of bones. They will have a number next to them that you need to reduce to 0 to destroy them. If you can destroy these obstacles with a particularly long combo chain, you will earn yourself star rocks. These are probably the hardest spendable material to obtain, but they are needed for later upgrades to your powers and helpers.
Even buying plants is an unusual experience. Rather than seeds in your pocket, you receive full sized plants with faces that hop after you wherever you go. Planting them consists of picking them up and throwing them into tilled ground. You can use your hoe to remove them if you want but only straight after they are first planted, once they start to grow, trying to remove them in this way will destroy them. The plants do sometimes get lost in the woods between your farm and the shop and can be found wandering about in areas nearby. Any unplanted plants will run to your home in terror when the time hits Deadnight, the games midnight, as ghosts appear and slowly make their way towards you. Being touched by one of these will leave you unconscious and paying the rescue fee again.
At the end of each season Korpo robs you with a tax bill which takes roughly 75% of your money earned. This only affects the coins, not the gathered materials, so its not that difficult to replace, especially with long combinations. You have a combo meter that fills each time you destroy a large item like a boulder or make lengthy combo chains. Once full you enter Fevertime, the meter starts to drain and you gain an aura that instantly replenishes harvested plants no matter what time of day they normally grow. For the duration of the aura you can claim combo after combo, so its a good idea to not spread your crops too widely when making your chains.
