Gleaner Heights is another title in the farming/life-simulation genre that exploded soon after the great success of Stardew Valley. Whilst not many have grabbed my attention due to looking like cheap knock-offs and near-exact clones of SDV, this one had an interesting twist highlighted on the store page (Steam link).
These people have double lives that I can discover, secrets that I can hold over them, that I can destroy them over?
Amazing!
And so, while it's on special for half price, I thought I'd grab it.
So far... I'm not really enjoying it as much as I'd like. Whilst I lived and breathed Stardew Valley for nearly 800 hours of my life, this one feels like a slog that I'm forcing myself through just to see these betrayals and plots and so my person can be an arse to the townsfolk.
I'm really not sure I'll make it through.
We begin simply enough with the player character customisation.
It's fairly basic -- choose your gender, your name, the name of the farm you're about to live on, and choose your appearance.
Some differences to other games in this genre include actually having a birthday, and choosing your previous profession from your life before you chose to throw everything away and live off the land.
There are a few to choose from, all of which have their own perks. Earning more money, being good with animals, doing more damage when fighting, earning friendship points quicker, and having a bunch of kitchen recipes straight off the bat.
I went with Cook... so I have 10 recipes! That I can't use until I upgrade my house so it has a kitchen. Wishing I went with something else now. Like Wrestler. Dealing more damage would be good.
We start off as is typical for this genre -- our newfound home is old, decrepit, in major need of repairs, and the fields are overgrown with grass and strewn with rocks and debris.
So naturally, I tidy it up a bit so I can plant some crops.
For those who may be interested in this game after playing similar games, you cannot plant your crops in a giant square. They must be in rows or, once they grow, you won't be able to walk through them to water them.
Luckily I skimmed through a "what beginners should know before starting" guide. 😉
Also, unlike in other titles, rain is a boon but can also be detrimental. You need to keep an eye on the TV's weather reports, because if you plant seeds a day before it rains your fresh seeds will wash away.
As with other titles, you can roam around with map and talk to the villagers you're destined to betray.
Dialogue doesn't vary much. So far I've gotten up to the second heart with one romanceable person and have filled the three quarters of the first friendship star with most of the other people. Dialogue has barely changed from Day One.
For a game where my priority is befriending the villagers so I can then blackmail them with my knowledge of their foul deeds... I was hoping there'd be more variation on the day-to-day dialogue instead of Alice telling me, every single day, that she finds the abandoned house creepy. The agent tells me, every single day, how he thinks Spring just leads to death and decay. Tobias tells me, every single day, that the forest is boring, so he's going to go do something else, like, go to the forest. Wait, what?
Repetitive. So repetitive.
Mining is very different, however. I had to google how to even mine since the mining caves have no rocks to break and you don't even have a pickaxe.
Apparently, instead of breaking rocks, you have to break down the walls with your hammer.
There are glowing mushrooms everywhere -- green ones apparently mean you're getting close to the next ladder down deeper into the mine, and digging around the other ones seem to yield more possible resources than just knocking down any old wall.
The mines are randomly generated every single time you go up or down a ladder, which makes getting back out a real pain in the butt. If you reach level 20, there's a ladder that takes up back to the top, but you have to reach level 20 first.
On the plus side, once you run out of stamina you can still keep digging and whatnot, however you'll no longer get experience points and won't be able to pick up any items that drop, and when you wake up the next day you'll only have half your stamina due to being exhausted.
The levelling-up system in this is pretty good though.
As you use tools you'll slowly level up your ability to use them, as you mine, farm, fish, whatever, you'll level up your skill in those tasks. And once you've skilled-up four times, your character officially gains a level where you can choose a perk relevant to what skills you've been working on.
Notable ones include having a larger inventory, gain more stamina, break down additional walls whilst mining, and RAMBO -- deal more damage whilst wearing a bandana, haha.
Whilst I was wandering around the town at night, picking flowers that only bloom at night so I can gift them repetitively to people the next day, as I do every day, I strolled past a couple's house and witnessed my first cutscene of the game!
Lee is a drug dealer. Matilda doesn't have a job and is spending Lee's hard-earned money on shoes. Lee proceeds to throw her around the house and choke her for a bit.
Yesssss, my first experience with the dark tales of this town has arrived.
For a fleeting moment.
Very fleeting.
I'm not sure what day that was, but there hasn't been a single cutscene or event anywhere else, for anyone else, since.
I want more gossip! I need more material for my future plans to destroy each and every person in this town! But... nothing is happening except the same repetitive tasks and dialogue each and every day.
I don't feel the, "just one more turn," with this game. And I really wish I did.
So far this game is about as much fun as congregating with a group of very strange strangers, staring at some chickens in total silence for four hours.
And the controls are god-awful too, even if you change the keybinds more to your liking. It's one of those games that are clearly designed for controller use and not keyboard-and-mouse. And sometimes the cursor disappears!!! Which can only be fixed by restarting the game. Eurgh.
I'm going to keep slogging through it in the hopes that it'll magically improve as I progress through the seasons, but, as I wrote earlier up there somewhere, I doubt I'll get very far.
This is no Stardew Valley, unfortunately. 😞
I mean, I don't want to play an exact clone like many of this genre are, but Stardew Valley had an -appeal- to it that made you want to keep playing, to talk to people every day, to progress no matter how slowly that progress was attained! It's a grindy game, but it's not a slog.
This one is a slog.
Until next time,
Thanks for stopping by. 🙃
All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, 