• Price: $24.99 USD
• Developer/Publisher: Soda Den
• Release Date: November 28, 2023 (NA & EU); November 30 (Japan)

A review code was kindly provided by Stride PR on behalf of Soda Den. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

I’ve been looking forward to Roots of Pacha for a long time now. I don’t know what it is about farming simulation games, but it’s definitely one of my favorite genres. It can be difficult to stand out in this…field (😉), but developer Soda Den came up with the incredibly unique concept of “a [single player and] co-op farming and life simulation game set in the stone age.” I’m excited to dive into this new game of “mammoth” proportions! 🦣

Although there are both single and multiplayer modes; this review will only cover single player mode for now. You get to customize your character’s appearance and choose your body type, skin color, eyes, hair style and color, and initial clothing.

You play as a character whose clan has just settled in a new land. Starting out, you live in your adoptive grandparents’ hut in the center of your new village. At first you don’t have many amenities in your new homeland; you’ll have to make contributions to your community and build up the clan’s prosperity levels in order to develop new inventions and facilities.

In this game, a month lasts 28 days, and your day runs from 6-2 AM. (You’re more than likely going to want to turn on longer days first thing because otherwise you may not get a lot done. I loved that this was an option in settings.) As you wander around each area, you’ll gather seeds from the “new” plants you encounter and plant them in the fields near your home.

Your knowledge of each crop will increase up to level 5, which provides you with more information such as the growth rate. For crops you’ve already discovered, you can purchase more seeds from another villager. What’s pretty great is that there aren’t store hours in the traditional sense; as long as the person is awake you can access their services!

The “livestock” are also not acquired traditionally in this game. You’ll run into herds of animals in the areas surrounding the village, and to tame them you’ll play a music mini game with your flute! They won’t trust you after just one attempt of course, but after a few days they’ll follow you back to your barns.

The animal options are really fun – there are the “livestock,” which include ostriches, ibex(es?), bison, and more. They come in a variety of colors, too! You can ride the livestock around to decrease travel time. Then you have pet options such as the adorable mini mammoths, bunnies, and wolves. Once you have your own house you can tame pets, and naturally the livestock live in barns.

They added another unique twist to the livestock; like in other farm sims, they can get sick, but here they have 3 different types of illnesses. You can gather or buy the ingredients to craft each herbal remedy. When the animals are healthy, you can gather their byproducts to use or “sell.”

There’s a contribution box where you can deposit the items you’ve gathered and crafted – this is basically the game’s equivalent of a shipping bin. Your “contributions” act as your currency in the community, and they also increase the clan’s prosperity levels. Higher clan prosperity means that the villagers can develop more ideas to benefit the community.

You start out with extremely rudimentary tools and facilities. As you find more new items the villagers will come up with inventions based on what you’ve discovered. They’ll give you a list of items they need to experiment with to finish their invention. Besides these quests, there’s also a task board for you to complete on your own. And the villagers will work on self-directed projects like an art station when the clan’s prosperity levels reach certain points.

The sense of community is really fantastic. Everyone is focused on making things better for the good of the clan. People will congregate in the hearth every day, or when it’s raining they’ll meet up at one family’s house each time. They’ll tell stories about the totem spirits and Pacha, establishing their cultural background.

Every season they hold creative festivals with activities like cave painting or beach days with spear-throwing and tug-of-war contests. They didn’t just copy and paste crop and livestock festivals, instead coming up with more innovative ideas. There are even events that are held every other week!

I just really liked the villagers. Even the (very few) characters who initially annoyed me Jelrod ended up changing my mind. To get to know them better, of course you’ve got to give them some gifts twice a week! Some characters will tell you what other people like, or you can just try to figure it out for yourself or Google.

They conveniently keep track of what you’ve given characters, and if they liked, disliked, or are neutral about something. Some days you’ll wake up to gifts from the people you’ve been getting to know! I love the reciprocation! You can also ask the villagers to dance for fun (and more importantly, to increase friendship levels).

The family relationships are really unconventional; your character was adopted by their grandparents, who are NOT in a relationship but are instead siblings that took you in together. Other characters have same-sex parents, or they may have half-siblings. It’s amazing to have different family models represented.

By now, you’ve probably figured out that the game does indeed have same-sex marriage! There are 7 male and 6 female marriage candidates. (I’m sad that we can’t date Nokk, too!) When you reach 6 flowers with them, they’ll ask if you’re interested in dating them. You can date all of the candidates at once if you’d like, and no one gets angry at you for it. The “kiss” prompt gets added when you interact with someone you’re dating, so you can get a kiss and dance with them.

There are two friendship events for each marriage candidate prior to the event where they ask to date you. These tend to involve some of the other villagers, again adding to the sense of community. I really liked the way that other people would comment on what happened during those events after they occurred. I think there’s a decent amount of fresh dialogue throughout the game, too.

If you agree to date someone, you then get to view their date event, and finally the event where they confess their love! You can agree to join them in a Union and get married (you can continue to date people during your marriage if you want to without any consequences still – since you can’t make duplicate saves with your progress and marry others, this works nicely).

It was so hard to choose who I wanted to marry, but eventually I went with Garrek. After about a week of marriage you can pray to the statue next to your bed and request a child; a baby gets delivered by Pacha or something like that 5 days later! A lot of times in these games I start getting a little antsy waiting several seasons for a kid to arrive, so I really appreciated the quick arrival.

Sadly, your spouse doesn’t help with your chores or the baby. They did add an interesting – and realistic – mechanic where you have to check on the kid between 3-4 PM every day and soothe them when they start crying. If you fail to get there they end up making a fuss and tiring you out overnight. Their baby phase lasts around two weeks, and then they become a toddler. You can choose a nanny for your kid, and you can ask for a second kid at that point.

Home is where the heart is, as they say, and it will take a few home upgrades to make room for your spouse and bundles of joy. The end result includes your bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a room for the kids. You can even decorate the house with furniture purchased from a villager – no materials necessary, just “currency”!

There are different tables, seating options, rugs, wall hangings, and more to choose from. Something really cool is the ability to “paint” clay pots using pixel art. The art displays quite well, and you can even choose between different plant arrangements for the pots, which is pretty cool. Customization is not just limited to the interior of your house, as you can place objects anywhere besides the reserved spaces outdoors. It’s also possible to customize your own appearance, with limited yet theme-appropriate wardrobe options.

I really had a great experience with Roots of Pacha. The game kept me busy riding – or running – around the map to talk to people, gather resources, explore, and customize my experience. And speaking of running, this actually runs really well on Switch.

The only exception is a minor audio bug where the music becomes distorted and starts crackling. This does appear to prevent the musical animal taming mini game from working right – as well as the mini game in the Carnival Festival. But it’s not game-breaking, and I’d wait until my current day ended and the game auto-saved my progress, then close and re-open the game to fix it.

My only real complaint would be that sometimes certain functions were unclear. I started off not realizing that you could determine the time of day with the dots above the tree in the top right corner. It also took me a while to figure out that some of the production “machines” allow you to click on them to add the items you want transformed, but others require you to hold them in front and deposit them.

Additionally, some mini games lacked instructions – I had to look up what to do with the bars (above) for the tug-of-war mini game. The racing mini game was a fun idea, but seemed too difficult. And the cave puzzles were fun yet occasionally frustrating.

For the most part, though, everything is pretty clear. They helpfully list your current quest information in your journal, and there’s a convenient map that shows everyone’s current location. As someone who’s used to playing farming sims, it’s easy to figure out most things in the game. But it doesn’t come off as a “cookie-cutter” farm sim at all to me. Roots of Pacha has its own distinct identity.

I loved the art style and graphics, and most of the time the music remains undistorted and suits the environments and Stone Age theme well. It was so nice to see the clan come together on a daily basis and really interact with each other and work together in meaningful ways. Roots of Pacha may be a farming/life sim set in the Stone Age, but it’s a wholesome and cozy game with a lot of great modern features. It’s one of my favorite games that I’ve played this year.

9/10