Evelyn's Farm review
:: WEIRD HARVESTPrice: $1.99
Version: 1.1.1
App Reviewed on: iPhone XR
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Evelyn’s Farm is a very unassuming game. With just a flat white background, some text, and a few select menu items, you experience a story about working on a farm to pay for college. Under this very simple exterior is a clicker that is much more involved and complicated than its appearance suggests.
Hired hand
The start of Evelyn’s Farm is innocuous enough. The game starts telling you that you’re looking to earn money for college and that you should talk to a woman named Evelyn to work on her farm to earn money for your education. From there, you pick produce to earn money in the hope of putting together the $50,000 you need to go to school.
As a clicker, all of this happens through a simple menu system where you tap to perform actions. To talk to Evelyn, for example, you just tap the “Talk to Evelyn” menu item. Some of these items then require additional taps before they trigger the action you want to perform. Specifically, some actions require a certain amount of “Knowledge” or “Strength” to perform them, and tapping repeatedly on buttons can fill the meters you need to trigger an event to keep the game moving along.
Twisted tapping
As you go about your simple life of picking produce and chatting with Evelyn, you start to understand that both your employer and her farm are not as normal as they first appear. You can choose to ignore these abnormalities and just earn your keep, or you can explore further to see what Evelyn might be hiding.
Choosing to do the latter is what injects character and systemic complexity to Evelyn’s Farm. Part of the fun in pursuing this path is the discoveries you encounter along the way, so I’ll avoid describing them, but Evelyn’s Farm ends up going some pretty wild places. A lot of this ends up involving investing your money and other resources to activate bonuses that make your ability to produce other resources faster. You know, classic clicker stuff.
Waiting game
As numbers climb ever higher in Evelyn’s Farm, tasks start to take longer and longer to complete. Much like other games in this genre, you can close out of the game and have it generate resources or work on tasks idly. This makes the late game of Evelyn’s Farm bearable. Instead of having to tap endlessly on tasks to move things forward, you can set and forget tasks in a few seconds and return to the game later to reap their rewards.
None of this is surprising for a clicker, but Evelyn’s Farm stands out from other games like it thanks to its narrative. Although it falls apart toward the end, the draw to keep playing the game comes from tapping away to see what new, odd development is on the horizon. Aside from the story, Evelyn’s Farm has a couple surprising mechanics, but otherwise feels like a really stripped-down clicker.
The bottom line
I really appreciate the no-nonsense style and presentation of Evelyn’s Farm. It enhances every subversive plot beat in the game. I also appreciate that it’s a clicker that doesn’t drag itself out forever or seek to ask players for money to speed things up. So even though it’s not exactly the most exciting-looking game out there, Evelyn’s Farm is still worth looking into.