PGF 2014: Wild Season Preview

Admit it, despite the sheer technological beauty of today’s video games, we’ve all probably yearned for that old-school feel every once in a while. Luckily, Quickfire Games’ upcoming game Wild Season may be the perfect answer to our cravings – bringing together the best of past and present gaming in one highly enjoyable farming-life simulation game.

Wild Season was one of the games that instantly caught our attention at the Philippine Game Festival (PGF) 2014 last Saturday, October 4 – the delightfully eye-catching art on its posters alone was already enough to warrant the curiosity of any attendee. However, it was our experience of the alpha build that convinced us even more of Wild Season’s huge potential.

Inspired by widely popular simulation role-playing games Harvest Moon and Rune Factory, Wild Season takes the player on a strange journey in the small town of Bedford, where the player has apparently purchased a farm that was never for sale in the first place!

Amidst all the confusion within the town, the player must now nurse the desolate lot back into its once beautiful state, build relationships with the wary townspeople, and uncover some suspicious secrets hidden within Bedford Valley.

The game, which began as a simple crowdfunding project on Kickstarter, ended up gaining so much support from the online community that it exceeded its original funding goal and got “greenlighted” on the popular online game platform Steam.

According to Sharan Balani, founder and game designer of Quickfire Games, his love for Harvest Moon and other old-school games were what drove him to start the project in the first place. “Why not take the play style we enjoyed back then and apply the elements present in modern video games?” he said.

Wild Season boasts of having a more mature undertone compared to other farming sims, along with a character-driven storytelling approach that provides the player with multiple story-lines to pursue. These become evident thanks to the outright fishy behavior of the townspeople, and, as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that there is indeed something Bedford’s residents are guarding so viciously.

Farming proved to be a delightful experience thanks to the fairly simple procedures, such as tilling the soil and selecting from various plant seeds, and the large plot of land given to you to work on. Aside from tending to the farm, the player can also explore and participate in Bedford’s festivities, competitions, and daily jobs.

Relationships will also seem more organic thanks to Wild Season’s “contextual relationship building”, which allows the NPCs to notice and react to your actions – like frequenting the bar, going out too little or too often, barging into their homes, and stalking certain townspeople!

One of Wild Season’s strongest assets is its art style – one reminiscent of Zenonia and the earlier Pokemon games but minus the pixelated effect. The clean, vibrantly colored visuals add to the game’s overall charm, and are the perfect way to highlight the town’s colorful, sunny, and garden-filled setting. Aside from the game’s “chibi”-like art, players will also enjoy the characters’ more detailed visual novel-style anime avatars, which appear whenever the player converses with them.

All in all, it’s easy to see why Wild Season has gained such a strong online fanbase – there’s a lot to love about this game, even in its current alpha stage. Wild Season successfully combines the farm simulator, roleplaying game, and visual novel genres, while still adding unique twists that distinguish it as an entirely new take on farming games.

Wild Season, like our other featured PGF games, showed us just how talented our Pinoy game developers are and how promising the Filipino game development scene is today. With such an impressive alpha demo, we’re excited to see what Quickfire Games has in store for us in the final version of the game!

Will you be picking up a copy of Wild Season once it hits Steam? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!