Cozy gamers! You’ve got another PC game to add to your library: Tales of Seikyu.
The game officially launched into 1.0 officially on June 11 and I had to take the chance to jump in and give it a play when I got a glimpse of the game in the Wholesome Direct!
“A peaceful farming life sim set on the island of Seikyu. Grow your farm, restore your ancestral home, form heartfelt bonds with villagers, and shapeshift into different spirit forms to explore a world that moves gently with the seasons,” the game’s Steam store description reads.
Tales of Seikyu entered early access on May 21 last year and its clear from the community response that the team at ACE Entertainment has been working hard to polish it up for the 1.0 launch.
This review will contain minor spoilers, but mainly focuses on gameplay mechanics.
Tales of Seikyu
Release date: June 11
Reviewed platform: PC
Released Platforms: PC
Developer: ACE Entertainment
Publisher: Fireshine Games, Logoi Games
Tales of Seikyu takes the classic mechanics from the beloved life/farm sim genre and melds it with deep cultural folklore behind Yōkai and communing with ancestral spirits.
I personally love that you enter this world with your sister Kon and are working together to solve the mystery of where the foxes (and your parents) have gone and how to unlock both of your full potential with your Yōkai transformations: yours into your fox form, and Kon into her human form.
Classic cozy gameplay with a twist
Tales of Seikyu offers some well-known cozy life-sim mechanics: You’ll farm crops, chop down trees, mine, defeat enemies to earn crafting ingredients, cook, decorate and grow your farm (inside your home and outside both) while also helping Seikyu develop and cultivating deep relationships with all of the villagers. There is also combat to partake in and puzzles to solve within the ruins.
The lore around the village and your character’s backstory lends itself to unique aspects of gameplay like the ability to shapeshift into different animals to help with different tasks around the world/farm or to help in combat i.e the Yōkai first form you unlock is a boar which is how you till your farmland, but also is great in combat against some early game enemies near your farm. You can also take on enemies in your human form using equipped weapons also.
Your Yōkai forms have the ability to completely change the way you interact with the world as you unlock them in Seikyu. The refreshed way to explore made sure the gameplay didn’t feel stale as I progressed through the story.
The game itself is 3D, which is a departure from many of the popular games in the genre that often have a 2D isometric view of the game environment. The character designs are gorgeous and the villagers are on their own schedule Seikyu, traveling around and living their own lives as the days come and go.
This includes NPCs visiting your farm to visit and gift items or to start quests. The deep dialogue and relationship progression left me feeling like each villager in Seikyu had layers to peel back through your friendships with them.
Each day after you sleep, you will get a rundown of what events are available each day like special events and festivals, new community board requests, birthdays, and new possible interactions with villagers.
Your minimap and expanded map are both incredibly useful for tracking down NPCs across the sprawling world. On your expanded map you can see the exact locations of all the villagers and the locations of their homes, the shops, and other areas of interest — a top tier quality of life feature that games with large casts of characters need especially when quests are involved.
A Couple Tips
I’m an item hoarder and so you will find me doing anything I can to build up my items, especially in a game that has crafting. You can root around trashcans in Seikyu and pick up a decent variety of items like seeds, woods, stone, ore, fish and a lot of items that end up being useful particularly in the early game in request board quests and the temple bundles (think Stardew’s Community Center bundles).
You can take on a part time job with the takoyaki merchants Theo, Tommy, and Ivan to unlock some crafting recipes for cooking stations like the drying rack, pickling station and more.
Minor quality of life qualms
Some quality of life mechanics would really bring the game together like crafting tables and cooking stations having the ability to pull from chests (a girl would even appreciate an adjacent chest pull like in Pokémon Pokopia).
Fast traveling exists in the game via the shrines you interact with, but I wish that some were located a little more central to the locations your visiting like the main village entrance in Seikyu.
There were some NPC pathing issues where characters have goofy interactions with stools/chairs or will walk into walls/barriers that are overall inconsequential and I’m sure will likely fixed in time as developers continue pouting love into Seikyu.
