In many cases, as in Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game or Stardew Valley, ‘cozy’ and ‘farming sim’ go hand in hand. However, they are hardly mutually exclusive, with some farming sim games leaning heavily into survival and/or psychological horror, in which the genre explores nightmarish terrors while immersing players in the comfort of a menial routine.
Indeed, the reason why horror and farming tend to pair so well together is that they are so seemingly unalike as genres, but actually have more in common than one would think: maybe farming sim games don’t always have jump scares or an ominous threat lurking about, but there is resource management, pests to rid the land of, and a decay to stave off. This makes Steam’s newest farming-sim horror game highly distinctive, leveraging the baked-in premise of “methodical high-stakes farming” to tell an “investigative thriller.”
As per its Steam store page, Crop tasks players with fending off rot on a decaying land. The game itself teases dark secrets to yield in the harvest, but gameplay doesn’t seem any more horrifying than a farming sim game might, and that seems to be the key. The...
