In recent years, there has been an uprising of farming games and many new developers have tried their hands at it. It has become increasingly difficult for a farming game to stand out but it shouldn’t have been a problem for Immortal Life with its unique setting amongst them: a farming game heavily inspired by Chinese cultivation stories. Unfortunately, the game is very janky. Fortunately, it’s still pretty good.


The game is absolute jank:

Everything from the menus to the gameplay is extremely buggy. The controls are off and sometimes they don’t work, sometimes you select a tool and because you were too fast it doesn’t work. There are many visual bugs too. Despite that, the game is playable and it’s fairly easy to look past the jank if you have played any other game like this. I did not encounter any game breaking bug.

This necessarily detracts from the enjoyment and it’s honestly a wonder why the devs did not invest more effort into the presentation when you see how much content there is behind it. As it stands, there is little hope to see improvements in this aspect, the game having been released as a 1.0 version.

Despite this, I did enjoy the game for about 40 hours because of all it offers.


Cool premises of cultivation:

The game is set in an ancient Chinese cultivation setting and that really rocks with me. I enjoy cultivation novels a lot and I think this game gets it right. It’s not straight out cultivation as you are a unique farmer / cultivator and I think this setup just works.


The game excels at setting up its cultivation atmosphere. There are moments where I was truly amazed: I am fishing in town and after I’m down, I notice a guy has popped up with a quest icon. I talk to him and he mentions the krills I caught, giving me a cooking recipe. That kind of thing feels so organic. There is a real life to the game through the numerous quests you get too, which set up every character’s role and what they do throughout the day.

It’s not perfect though. While the game has some unique moments like that, it also has a lot of static NPCs with the same dialogue throughout the entire game. Even the main characters will say the exact same line the whole game (not even two lines, yes) when you choose to talk to them to improve your relationship.

The translation could also use a rework. Sometimes it’s tough to understand the text.


Diversified gameplay and some unique features

One of the things that compensates the jankiness of this game is that it offers a variety of unique gameplay elements.

Tending to your farm is more fun when you have a spell to summon a rain cloud, magic scythes that tear down crops to collect them and you can use the wind to spread seeds. It’s very effective though it’s a shame that all of these tools are not available from the get go. They play into your MP reserves too, making stats quite important even outside of combat.

Instead of your standard full recovery at night, you only recover your stats partially according to the decorations in your house. Therefore, it becomes a minigame in itself to optimise your recovery. Sleep is also not mandatory and you can skip it if you have enough food instead or haven’t used up your stats.

Very late in the game, you get introduced to a “feng shui farming” system which is interesting but I didn’t really think much of it. As it really involves going back and forth from one side of town to buy things you need, I wasn’t a big fan of it.

There are a variety of other gameplay elements which aren’t quite as unique and in my opinion they also don’t work as well: cooking is a mini-game similar to Overcooked but a little too jank for my appreciation and it gets repetitive fast; the combat seems inspired by a game like Vampire Survivors but the spells aren’t really interesting and it’s also very repetitive, with boring maps on top of it; fishing or alchemy are your usual gameplay and don’t really offer much…


Not so desirable lategame:

I think that around 35 hours in the game, I had seen most of what it had to offer. I unlocked every gameplay element and past that point, all that’s left is the story progression and half a dozen dungeons to clear.

Unfortunately it’s around this time that the game starts being quite tedious. As you unlock more town areas, you get to walk more to reach farther places and there’s no efficient way of teleporting (nor is it easy to unlock). You don’t even get to build the save/storage crystals that allow you to quickly access your storage, unlike at the beginning of the game. This makes some portions of the game really savage: it takes a full minute to walk from the nearest storage crystal to the alchemist / smith and you can only consult their list of crafting by visiting them. It’s even farther away if you need something at the farm instead.

The dungeons also suddenly become extremely hard, as if to counter the player rushing and force you into a grind. You absolutely need to use buffs and upgrade to the maximum every time to get a normal level of difficulty. This really disincentivizes the upgrade system and buffs in my opinion because they become mandatory. You don’t feel the progress of upgrading any more because monsters stay tanky and constantly requiring to cook will also make you tired.

This is also somewhat a problem through the game: you’re constantly forced to engage with every single gameplay element and if you don’t like one or get bored of it, tough luck. If you play another game like Stardew, you know you could easily ignore a feature and get by just fine. You don’t really get alternative ways here, such as paying money to get some of the stuff.


Overall I had a fun time with the game but I’m not sure I would recommend it. The jankiness is really detrimental to the enjoyment of the game and I really wish they had put efforts into fixing that. Ultimately it feels like a forgettable game and it doesn’t really stand out in any way.

Despite the appearances, the game is extremely poorly optimised. On my laptop with a 1050 Ti and a i5-8300H, I would often get frame drops in later areas or the farm and I think the game suffers from memory leaks. And don’t even try to play this game on a HDD, it just doesn’t work somehow.

It's a short game that was developed after a game jam project and it's pretty well done. The game is certainly functional and isn't really lacking in any department: it looks okay, plays okay, the sound and animation qualities are there.

It could help if it had a few more improvements such as being able to get out from the zoom mode by using the left mouse click, making it less tedious to turn the clocks or having the cooking pan always land in the right direction instead of flying around but those are minute details in a game that's about two hours long.

Amanda is your typical horror game that tries to take advantage of childish things, here it’s obviously Dora. It doesn’t really hold any surprise but it’s fun enough to play. I do wish it went further with its themes or it focused better on one of them instead of multiple ones, I think there are a few good ideas such as a child being stuck in a TV world which turns into some kind of hellish place: it’s an interesting concept that doesn’t try to make the player scared for their lives, instead it’s just as scary as hearing about what a killer could have done to a kid. You’ve got a kid right in front of you, suffering, and you can’t do anything about it. There are vague hints of this but ultimately the game stays at a surface level with everything. It seems more like a mix of ideas and jump scares than something cohesive, which is a shame.

It’s a very good parody of Dora on the other hand. The presentation is really top notch.

The puzzles can also get really cryptic. One thing I didn’t understand personally is that at some points in the story where you hit a game over, I wasn’t experiencing a bug where the game didn’t save but it was intentional.