Harvestella demonstrates its delightful vegetable names

Harvestella is Square Enix’s chill life simulation game about farming and crystals. It was announced back in June, but a trunk of new details was released today including a lengthy video demonstration in the middle of Nintendo’s Treehouse livestream at Gamescom. Watch it below, if only to read the delightful vegetable names.

The video is split into chapters, and the Harvestella showcase begins around the 49m 20s mark.

Harvestella’s world is kept stable by four giant crystals, and its protagonist is an amnesiac found sleeping in a field. So far, so trope-y, but the story gets a little more interesting due to Omens. Omens are armored figures believed to be responsible for the Quietus, a season that keeps getting longer during which the townspeople’s crops all die, and one of them crashes to earth inside a comet at the start of the game.

Part of the game is obviously about uncovering the mysteries of the Omen and saving the world of Harvestella, but the real, ahem, meat of it is farming interspersed with combat, Stardew Valley-stlye. Combat is shaped by a Jobs system, which defines the weapons and abilities you can use, and includes Fighter, Mage, Shadow Walker and Sky Lancer jobs. Over on the Harvestella site Today, Square Enix also introduced the Assault Savant job, which mixes “science and martial arts”, apparently.

Farming, meanwhile, looks like you’d expect: plant seeds, water seeds, wait, and harvest. I do like the lush illustrations of the different vegetables you can grow, however, and the just-a-little-wrong names for the vegetables. Some are slight twists on the real thing, such as “lantern pumpkins” and “rainbow beans”, but others are just fun to say, like “carrops” and “cucumbles.”

You can, of course, also rear farm animals with similarly adorable names, such as cluffowls and woolums. You’ll find these on display in the video or post linked above.

Harvestella will launch on November 4th onSteam.

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