Farmtale

Farmtale asks very little of its modest price tag: build up a small farm from a single chicken, harvest crops, hire workers to automate the busywork, and spend the rest of your time decorating the place exactly how you like it. At roughly NZD 6, that pitch works for a real number of players, and the review sample backs that up with consistent, specific praise for the core loop being genuinely relaxing rather than merely inoffensive.

A cheap, chill loop that genuinely delivers what it promises

Reviewers across several different points in the game's life describe the same basic appeal: low-stakes farm building, real freedom in how you lay out crops and decorations, and a pace gentle enough to check in on casually rather than optimize seriously. Cosmetic customization for the farm and for animal costumes gives that decorating impulse real room to play, and multiple reviewers frame the low price as making the whole experience an easy, low-risk recommendation even before weighing its flaws.

A support history that's genuinely more complicated than either side tells it

Farmtale entered Early Access in April 2020 and remains there today, more than six years later, and the developer's own public record tells a genuinely two-part story worth separating out carefully. An early wave of reviewers accused the developers of abandoning the game almost immediately, pointing to a single bug-fix patch in the same month as launch and silence after that. That specific claim doesn't hold up against the fuller record: a substantial redesign arrived in 2021, followed by several more updates — new content, bug fixes, a music pack — through October of that year, with reviewers from that window specifically praising fast, responsive developer communication. The claim that does hold up, and that this review can confirm directly, is what happened next: no further patches or announcements appear in the public record after that October 2021 update, a genuine, nearly five-year gap by the time of this review.

A specific, unresolved crash bug sitting inside that silence

The most serious consequence of that gap is a specific, repeatedly reported technical problem: multiple more recent reviewers describe a fatal crash tied to the game's engine, commonly striking around ten to eleven hours into a save file, with several independently reporting that every standard fix — reinstalling, clearing save data, disabling cloud saves — failed to resolve it. A bug this specific and this consistently described, landing during exactly the kind of long session the game is designed to encourage, is a serious mark against recommending it without a clear caveat, especially given no visible patch has addressed it in years.

Content depth and the ongoing idle-versus-clicker debate

Separately from the bug, content thickness draws sustained complaints spanning the game's entire history: reviewers checking in shortly after the 2021 redesign and reviewers playing far more recently both independently report exhausting most available progression within three to six hours. A related, more specific complaint disputes the "idle" framing itself, with reviewers comparing the actual pacing to more actively-clicked games like Adventure Capitalist and naming specific free alternatives they consider more genuinely idle — a milder version of the genre-tag-mismatch pattern that shows up across several other games in this lane.

What the achievement data itself adds

Global achievement data offers a modest supporting signal for the content-thinness complaint. The most commonly earned achievement clears just over half of all owners, but completion drops into the single digits for the majority of the list — a shape consistent with a game whose early hours hook a real number of players before the available content runs out, rather than one gatekept by any real difficulty. That lines up closely with reviewers' own accounts of maxing out most systems within just a handful of hours, regardless of which specific point in the game's now six-year Early Access history they happened to be playing it.

Six full years in Early Access, and still counting

It's worth stating plainly what "still Early Access since April 2020" means in practice at this point: Farmtale has now spent longer in Early Access than many finished games spend in active development from concept to 1.0 release. That length alone isn't disqualifying — this lane has covered other titles still genuinely in Early Access years after their original launch — but combined with the nearly five-year gap in visible public updates, it's fair to treat any official "Early Access" framing with real skepticism rather than assuming a 1.0 release, further content or a fix for the reported crash bug is still actively coming. Buyers should treat the game as it exists today, not as a promise of what it might eventually become.

Verdict

Farmtale delivers a genuinely relaxing, cheap idle-farming loop, and its developers earned real credit for a substantive redesign and support push through 2021 that directly answered early criticism. What holds it to a below-average score is what came after: a specific, unresolved crash bug repeatedly reported in more recent reviews, alongside a support silence stretching back nearly five years with no sign of the issue being addressed. Worth its low price for a few relaxing hours; back up your save file regularly, treat the "Early Access" label with realistic expectations given how long it's been attached, and don't count on new content or a fix for the reported crash bug arriving based on the visible record of the last several years.