Roots Of Pacha Almost Review

March 03, 2024

First blog post since the new layout! Honestly I can't stop staring at my own site, it looks so good even if it is just the same content as always. Migrating to Eleventy and setting up the Github action deployment thing have made uploading things way less of a hassle, so I want to try and have more updates on my site this year. Unfortunately I always decide to start doing things one week before a new semester begins, so I'm sure that will fall apart as soon as it does.

Anyways, this review is long overdue but I simply have not thought about this game ever since I was done playing it. This post is cobbled together from a post from my defunct Cohost from way back then. It's not that it's a bad game — if anything it's quite generic even with all the interesting new elements — but it only uses said elements as a way to differentiate itself amidst the loathsome genre of cozy games while still trying to cash in that audience. Last I heard from the dev team they had a falling out with their publisher and were trying to kickstart a "solarpunk survival crafting open world game", a sequence of words that kills brain cells whenever I read it.

This post has required reading, also. If you haven't already, go read my post about my thoughts on the farming game genre. You can even see there at the end my hopes for Roots of Pacha. Did the game turn out like that? No, and I'll elaborate.

Let's first talk about the prosperity points system (bungus tokens), since it's the big thing I mention in that post and it's honestly the one aspect of the game they did kind of alright on. When you turn in a resource, you get contribution points for them, and you can trade them for other NPCs like you would money in a regular farming game. It's money. It's just money with a different name. I honestly don't know how you could make this mechanic not resemble money, but it feels like they didn't even try.

Though the good part of this is that, aside from money, you also increase the village's prosperity counter. The prosperity counter goes up even when you yourself don't contribute anything, because the other NPCs do. That's cool! At certain milestones you get more quests and other unlockables, but also changes to the village such as lampposts, better roads and brand new spaces for the NPCs to hang out. Even if these are mostly cosmetic and only sometimes affect the NPC schedules, they're quite nice! Seeing society progress and have technology be invented that makes people's lives easier really clicked with me. Unlike Stardew Valley, where people barely give a shit about the newly reformed community center, the NPCs here actually use the new things that get maded. Low bar, but it is there.

Another thing that's kinda cool is that most of the festivals don't require you to submit crops or anything, and are instead minigames you can do no matter your progress in the game. I suspect this is the case in part because the calendary only gets invented kinda late in the game so you wouldn't have any way to prepare for any festivals until then, but it's still nice.

Also the character diversity is pretty decent. Decent amount of characters of color and at least one canon lesbian couple. I'm a bit dissapointed with the lack of disabled characters, though. There's the old people that can't work because of their old age, but that barely counts. There's one character that is maybe autistic, but he'd fit the savant stereotype if he was so I hope he's not. I was really hoping there were more physically disabled characters in this game, since disabilities in prehistory is kind of a hot topic. There's at least a hint of it — if I recall correctly, you specifically invent the fishing rod because someone's back hurts when they spear fish — but I was really hoping it was something more explicit.

Speaking of dissapointment, the feature I was most excited for in this game turned out to be pretty bland: the irrigation systems. It's something you unlock in the late game and it pretty much eliminates the need to water anything by hand. The implementation itself isn't really what I have issues with though. The limitations are fair, it the water channel only goes so far on its own and you need to craft more items to extend the path which cost a few precious ores. No, it's the... "what now" that's lacking. What now indeed? You're freed from one of the most time consuming chores you have. You're now free to focus on... one of the other chores you already had more than enough time to take care of before. Technology that is supposed to make your life easier and free you to relax and have fun is actively making your game more boring. It might give you enough time to complete the main storyline if you haven't already, I guess.

That's my main problem with this game. It borrows these themes of technology, increasing prosperity and labor and doesn't do anything interesting with them. The most interesting thing in this game is the fact that you're not only farming but actively domesticating plants to be more edible (have you seen those before and after pictures of corn? It's that). With more nutritious food and a less time-consuming way to produce it, you're pretty much setting future generations up. But that theme is not explored at all, no one acknowledges the monumental steps in agriculture you're taking. It's thematically relevant that pickles, preserves and brews are worth more Bungus Tokens, but was that on purpose? No, of course not. They did that because those same items are worth more money in other farming games.

Maybe it was intentional. Maybe I'm being too cynical. Maybe there's a dev interview buried somewhere that confirms this was all intentional and they had a good reason not to put any of this into the game explicitly and instead go with a barebones xenophobia narrative. I don't care. I'm literally straining my brain to remember anything about this game that I haven't written down before. It just feels like it doesn't care about its own themes. I used to care a lot, and I still do, but I'm not going to invest any more energy into it if the devs themselves don't care. I'm sick of cozy games. Wholesome games. Loathsome games direct. Top ten cozy games of 2023. Top 10 farming games to relax. Top 10 Stardew Valley inspired games. Leave me alone.