YT\Twitch news channels and news sites for farming games?

[Velvet]

Hello,

I only know one YT channel that tends to review new and upcoming farming games, Josh's Gaming Garden. I'm sure others exist, too? I'd be glad to know.

And maybe there's a new site dedicated to this type of game, or to the simulation genre in general?

[infel]

I think this YT channel would be perfect for you https://www.youtube.com/@MissBubbles/featured. Miss Bubbles does a lot of coverage on farming games and also JRPGs at times. She is someone who really loves cozy games and farming games though, and often has lists about those types of games. She's seems pretty nice as well. Maybe give some of her videos a watch. As for a website, maybe try this one https://ladiesgamers.com/. They have a lot variation, but do a good amount of reviews about farming games and simulation games. Like Miss Bubbles, I find this site cozy and very friendly.

[Terranigma Freak]

I don't know about youtube, but I know a site that keeps news on farming games. Check out Ushi No Tane at www.fogu.com/hm They have a forum that also talks about upcoming farming games.

[Velvet]

I think this YT channel would be perfect for you https://www.youtube.com/@MissBubbles/featured. Miss Bubbles does a lot of coverage on farming games and also JRPGs at times. She is someone who really loves cozy games and farming games though, and often has lists about those types of games. She's seems pretty nice as well. Maybe give some of her videos a watch. As for a website, maybe try this one https://ladiesgamers.com/. They have a lot variation, but do a good amount of reviews about farming games and simulation games. Like Miss Bubbles, I find this site cozy and very friendly.

Thank you, this is perfect!

[Kikki]

YouTube is rotten with 'cozy games' channels. Not a single one focuses solely on farming games specifically (including Ladies Gamers and Miss Bubbles) but a lot find their way in there.

THere is also Eeowna and Payton's Corner, for example. If you like someone who doesn't keep their own face up on the screen, there's Fleurs. (I think Fleurs is more into life sims that involve home and house building and the like, rather than farming, though. Haven't watched enough to be sure of her slant on 'cozy' games.)

They all cover pretty much the same games. Everyone focuses on 'cozy' games, so the same ones keep coming up over and over. Each person has a slightly different variety in that you'll see the big ticket cozy games covered by everyone, but there are lots that slip under the radar more, and each streamer tends to scoop up different ones of those.

I find that, content-wise, it doesn't matter much who you choose. They all cover largely the same stuff, so it's more about whose voice and presentation you like best, whose opinions you agree with, etc. Eeowna has the most interesting voice of all the female streamers I can think of. It's a little low, but more than that, it's...sort of a thickly throaty? I watched a few videos from her at first cuz I was trying to figure her voice out, lol.

I'm not actually a big watcher of streamers, but YouTube still throws dozens of cozy-game streamers at me every time I'm browsing. Once you start watching even one, YouTube will tend to suggest more and more of them. If you like watching that kind of thing, I'd try one from everybody who comes up, since personality and presentation can make a huge difference in how fun they are.

[Velvet]

Kikki, you're right, I've already found a lot of such channels myself, too. They don't show up in my list yet, but when it finally occurred to me to just type 'farming sims' in YT, all the channels you've named came up

I wish they covered farming sims and not cozy games per se, but I guess some interesting games can be found that way, too. E.g. The Graveyard Keeper is one of the best games I've ever played, but noone who plays farming sims covers it, since farming is not the focus (although there is some). I liked MsBubbles for covering it, and for having the same opinion as me about SOS:AWL (negative).I can't same the same

To be fair, I don't know what type of games the Graveyard Keeper and Times at Portia and the Atelier series are. They aren't farming sims, but they're so similar. I'm stumped where to look for games like that. They're crafting games... maybe? Most crafting games usually involve some kind of zombie apocalypse, though.

[Kikki]

They aren't specifically farming sims, but they are life-sims. (Well, Atelier isn't. It's a slice-of-life crafting JRPG.) But Graveyard Keeper and Portia are both life-sims that happen to have farming in, even though it's just a side issue.

If you haven't already played it (what chance, at this point, I wonder?) then Dragon Quest Builders is a fantastic one to try. Either game...1 or 2. (Important note: I have played Minecraft but don't like it at ALL. They're both block-builders...except with DQB having much nicer, non-pixellated graphics...but I LOVE DQB and borderline hate Minecraft, so...not the same!) It's all the better to try because they have HUGE demos. DQB2 in particular...you can play basically the entire first chapter, excepting only its final battle. It gives you AMPLE time to test out the gameplay and the building and the story. It also has lots of farming. It's even the focus of the first chapter (though not later chapters, but you'll need to farm at least a little to have enough food for health and stamina.)

The demos, at least, would be great to try if you haven't already done so. DQB2 is vastly improved over 1 in some QoL and a lot of extra building feature and options, but there are reasons why some like the first game better than the second (it mostly comes down to chapter and story structure, I think.) There's NO need to play 1 to 'get' 2, though...they are not connected, story-wise. Well, anyway. Since they have good demos, I figure it can't hurt to suggest them, in case you haven't already tried 'em.

Hope you found some gaming news channels that work well for you. I find they all cover mostly the same stuff, but the WAY they cover it can be quite different and it's nice to find a streamer who doesn't aggravate you and whose opinions you can click with.

[Velvet]

Thanks, I'll definitely play the demos! Sorry for being so late with the reply, the forum doesn't have notifications, and during the hectic days of my life I tend to forget to check it. A lot.

Graveyard Keeper is definitely not a life-sim, though, it doesn't even have relationships, the focus is on crafting. It's really hard to place it anywhere. It's more like Atelier I guess, with more extensive crafting but less focus on NPCs. It's a shame the game isn't as popular as it deserves, I blame the theme. People get turned off by graveyards.

[Kikki]

This site does have notifications, but only if someone quotes you. Like this, if I do this, you should get a red notification:

Thanks, I'll definitely play the demos! Sorry for being so late with the reply, the forum doesn't have notifications, and during the hectic days of my life I tend to forget to check it. A lot.

Graveyard Keeper is definitely not a life-sim, though, it doesn't even have relationships, the focus is on crafting. It's really hard to place it anywhere. It's more like Atelier I guess, with more extensive crafting but less focus on NPCs. It's a shame the game isn't as popular as it deserves, I blame the theme. People get turned off by graveyards.

I never checked to see if you get emails of notifications or not, though. I think you can, if it's in your settings, but I turn emails off on every site I ever belong to. I hate getting notification emails, lol.

~

Hope you'll like one of the demos. The games have a lot in common, but they changed up a fair bit for 2, so they're different enough from each other that I'd find it hard to know which to recommend to you more. Thankfully the demos are nice and LONG, especially for 2. In theory you could even just play them indefinitely, though you wouldn't be able to progress the story past a certain point. Anyway, they're so different from anything else, I don't wanna make any bets on which game you'll like more, or if you'll like either of them at all.

~

Graveyard Keeper definitely IS a life-sim, though. So is Portia. 'Life simulation' does not have to include relationships...that's not an essential element, just one of many that can be included. To qualify as a life-sim, a game has to simulate life, that's all. Regular daily tasks done repetitively, one way or another, usually with the goal of succeeding at something (though not always.) Like making a lot of money, or getting through a story, becoming the best 'this' or 'that', etc. (Best cafe, best crafter, best cake-maker, etc.)

The Steam shop lists it as a 'management sim', which is fine also...that's a subcategory of life simulation, usually leaning into the 'business life' side rather than the 'home life' side. Switch just lists it as 'simulation' because it has no subcategories within the genre at all (the Switch genre listings are really unsophisticated...makes it hard to search for games you might like by category, ime. Presumably you would find a flight simulator and a farming game in the same category, on Switch, even though they're nothing alike.) You can break life-sim down into subcategories, if you want, since it covers a large array of games. I think it'd be tough to try to classify GK as a farming life sim, just like you can't put Portia in that category, or ACNH...they do contain farming, but only as a side issue. The gameplay in no way revolves around the farming in any of those games.

The Atelier games are RPGs. They're unique ones, for sure, since they're spliced nearly 50/50 with 'life sim' type elements...days passing, necessary regular crafting, character events, etc. But there's just as much emphasis on the gathering through battle and completing the story framework. They're not open-ended and you can't really just do whatever you want on your own schedule, so they never felt enough like a life-sim to me. They always make me feel rushed and forced into doing things I don't want to do. Just not my series, I guess. (I do like RPGs, mind you...but Atelier just doesn't seem to hit any of my soft spots...misses them all by a tiny margin, it seems.)

~

The big content warning label that pops up, barring you from even LOOKING at Graveyard Keeper on Steam until you accept the warning, probably automatically puts some people off, too. I know I will usually not even bother looking at a game if a gore warning comes up when I go to try. (That's what comes up on GK when I browse Steam, ridiculously enough. I have GK so I know full well that guts or not, the game is NOT gory by any definition I can relate to with other games in the category.) IT is a really fun game, though. I have to go back to it some day. I only played about a week of the game before other things came up to take my attention away from it.

[Velvet]

This site does have notifications, but only if someone quotes you.

I didn't know that a quote is needed! I just bookmark the topics I want to get notified of, but sometimes I forget to bookmark. However, I was talking about the email notifications. At some point, I asked on this site if it's possible to implement them and was told NO. It's still the only forum I know (and likely in the world) that has no email notifications.

If the definition of a life-sim is so broad, then a lot of games are life-sims? I still can't see GK as a life-sim, it's focused on crafting too much to be thought of as anything but a crafting game. If you've only played one week in GK, you probably haven't seen how focused it is on crafting. It's tricky with the Atelier games, too, although the focus on crafting is too intense to classify them as JRPGs. I'd say they're crafting games, and the JRPG part is a side activity. But I didn't play the latest games in the series, so maybe that has changed. Since Sophie, I got disappointed in the franchise, Sophie had no appealing characters and was so boring for me that I avoided the newest games ever since.

I can see why GK is classified as a management sim, though. It has elements of Honey I Joined the Cult in it, after all. I enjoyed that part of the game, upgrading the church, giving various types of sermons and getting more and more from church-goers. The Cult of the Lamb has 100% the same church\sermon mechanics, it was definitely copied from GK.

Hopefully I'll like Dragon Quest Builders, I actually love Minecraft! With all the mods, especially the tech mods, it's always a different game. And there are some really difficult versions of it with an extremely long quest line, like GregTech New Horizons (maybe one day I'll finish it).

[Kikki]

If the definition of a life-sim is so broad, then a lot of games are life-sims?

[snip]

Hopefully I'll like Dragon Quest Builders, I actually love Minecraft! With all the mods, especially the tech mods, it's always a different game. And there are some really difficult versions of it with an extremely long quest line, like GregTech New Horizons (maybe one day I'll finish it).

Yeah, the life-sim category is quite large. Games that simulate only one very specific thing, like a flight simulator, don't fit into the life-sim category...though of course it is still a simulation game...but most other things do.

Oh, that made me think of a game that's hard to classify, that I've seen listed as both a life-sim and a management sim and even as a crafting game (and a building game), though I wouldn't have thought of it as anything outside of pure management, personally. But I guess I can see how it qualifies for the others, if I turn my head and squint, kind of? Anyway, it's Two Point Hospital and/or the sequel, Two Point Campus. They're kind of like a building tycoon game? Sort of? In the first, you build hospitals...multiple ones. You unlock more machines and treatment options as you go. Your clients are sick people who come to the hospital, and you have to cure them in good time, to keep their satisfaction high, kind of like with a restaurant-type sim, except the setting is really different and there's less clicking that needs to happen. You build a nice reception room and it will increase their patience, for example...they'll become dissatisfied much slower, giving you more time to do things.

It's rather silly, though in a cute way. For example, you can have people walking into your hospital with lightbulbs in place of their heads. If you have a De-Lux-O-Luxe Machine in your hospital, you will be able to diagnose them with Lightheadedness, and you'll be able to treat them (their head gets unscrewed and replaced with a human head. Et voila...no more Lightheadedness.) It's a low-level illness, but you can't cure it right on game start-up...you'll have to unlock the machine needed, first.

Anyway, it all affects how much money you'll get. The idea is to run a profitable hospital. (Or university, in the second game.)

I don't really think of it as a crafting game, though I did see it listed once in an article on great crafting games, so...maybe some people do? Even though there's no resource-gathering, iirc. I guess you kind of craft all the machines and amenities? Well, thought I'd mention it, anyway. REALLY not sure if it'd be of interest to you but I also figure it's possible you haven't looked into it, so...might as well mention it. It's definitely in the management arena. I was surprised to find it listed as a life-sim, but if we're looking at it within the management subcategory, then yeah, I guess so.

Let us know if you find any especially good or unique YouTubers or Streamers. I mostly keep running into the same ones over and over.