Welcome to my Cornucopia preview. Cozy Game Reviews was given a complimentary game code courtesy of Keymailer. Our game reviews are always objective and honest; read more about our transparency policy.
- Buy Cornucopia [Early Access] on Steam
Stop: This is not a review! I don’t think it’s fair to review ‘early access’ versions of a game, so I endeavour to provide my thoughts and impressions + give a recommendations to buy now or wait for updates.
Cornucopia is a story- and character-driven farming sim that has been in Early Access since July 2023. It blends 2.5D pixel art, an intricate soil quality system, compulsively character-driven narration, and the strangest AIM-style text roleplay dialogue I have ever seen in a game (uwu *holds your hand*).
Still in Early Access, Cornucopia has gone through several version updates already, pushing it closer and closer to its final form. But should you buy it or wait until full launch reviews? Here are my Cornucopia Early Access first impressions:
Cornucopia charges out of the gate determined to be unique. Rather than moving from the city and inheriting an old rundown farm, the player character is found frozen in ice with no memories by townsfolk and given land to sustain them while they recover. I’m usually game for a genre twist, no matter how unusual, but things deteriorated from there.
The game comes with a soil type/quality system that requires you to match seeds to the particular flavor of soil (sand, silt, clay—that kind of thing) they like best. Soil types vary on a square-by-square basis, meaning that a 3X3 crop block may need to be speckled with 2, 3, 4, maybe 9 different types of flora if you intend on optimizing your gardening quality. Not only is it visually ugly, but it’s a lot of work for a system that doesn’t really add anything exciting to the farming sim genre. It feels like busywork more than anything revolutionary of useful.
I ventured into town to meet the locals, as NPC side-stories tend to make or break life sim games for me. What I found there was…baffling. I was immediately tossed into a cut scene between two star-crossed lovers caught in a classic rom com misunderstanding. Over the course of my short playtime, I was caught like a nickel in the washing machine amidst a confusing torrent of scenes between these two characters that I didn’t know—much less like yet—and it all played out like a bad slice-of-life anime.
I cannot stress enough how disinterested I was. I don’t know these characters yet. I didn’t know they liked one another. I can’t invest in their story without some sort of warm up. In media res doesn’t play well in these kinds of small community life sims. Players expect some sort of story arc, well-paced, that starts at…well, the beginning. A love confession gone wrong is not the beginning.
The game continued to baffle me with its story and character choices. My dog threatened me and then said no one would believe me if I informed others he could speak. A Japanese woman dressed in full Geisha attire to manage…her country fish shop. Dialogue included actions/emotions in italic or asterisks, like some kind of weeb forum roleplay shtick. All the women are so well-endowed it’s uncomfortable to look at them in anything less than a turtleneck. I felt like I was in someone’s weird fanfic. And I wanted out.
And it sure didn’t help that every action I took in the game seemed to bury me in some sort of collectables/scratch card reward system that quickly overwhelmed my senses. It seemed like everything I did unlocked one—or many—scratch lotto-style mini games that delivered various…rewards, I guess.
If I could have kept up with what was going on, I could probably give more details. But I was drowning in an overwhelming amount of them, not to mention choice-based rewards for some unrelated milestones (I suppose?)—so many dings and notifications that it felt like I was playing a mobile game. Or was in a tiny, relentless casino.
Even the fishing mini game was a chance-based, Pachinko-style mechanic. It was sensory overload without much tactical play satisfaction.
I tried to push the main story line forward to see if there was any fun to be had there but the map was damn near impenetrable. There were plenty of cliffs and dead ends, tons of places where it was easy to fall down a level but uber challenging to get back up, and extreme after-dark window dimming that made it easier to stand still and pass out than try to get back home.
It seemed like the prime directive was to gather 13 Gemstone Fruits and restore the valley to its former glory (whatever that means). By the end of my 7-hour play test, I had inadvertently stumbled into owning 2 of them, mainly by blitzing through character cutscenes that I accidentally set-off like bear traps around every corner. Before I could even grasp what was being asked of me or why it mattered, I had progressed nearly 15% through this main plot. #Winning, I guess.
The problem with the awkward pacing and frankly uncomfortable character interactions is that moving the game from Early Access to Full Release won’t fix it. These aren’t missing elements of the game waiting to be built in or skeletal components that just need some fleshing out…these are fundamental flaws within the core of the game. Nothing but a total rewrite could shape Cornucopia into something I would recommend cozy gamers pay for.
And to be honest, I’m a little scared to post this preview. Looking at the in-Steam reviews and comments, the developer seems to be targeting bad reviews and the folks that write them quite aggressively. But I think it’s important that players know what they are getting into so they can weigh all the facts and make an informed decision. Just because I didn’t like Cornucopia, doesn’t mean others won’t. But if you have read my game reviews and mostly agreed with my tastes, then this might be one to skip for now.
Try Instead: Ova Magica Early Access: First Impressions
Stay cozy, gamers!