My day at Lightyear Frontier starts with a little farm work. On a good day, it rains, so I don’t have to water the crops. On a bad day, weeds spontaneously sprout from the sky and I have to catch them before they land on my precious plants. Either way, when I’m done, I put the day’s harvest into the processing machines to work while I’m gone, and then I go prospecting for minerals.
My goals are clear. I need to build a fresh machine or upgrade my mech so I can clear a fresh area of the map and gain fresh resources in return. This will allow me to – you guessed it – build fresh machines or upgrade my mech again. There may be a few steps to juggle along the way, but nothing that requires me to keep long flowcharts of recipes in my head. When I come back, I’ll have everything I need to take the next step. I always feel like I’m making progress.
I go through this routine almost without a hitch, growing round after round of alien crops that range from the familiar (Rabbage is a cabbage, only red, and wheat is, well, wheat) to the conveniently strange (Zappertwigs, as their name suggests, are electric). I’m usually gone before the trader shows up, because he doesn’t really sell anything I need—everything is out there in the world for me to pick up myself. I could place a few orders for the guy on the neighboring planet, but he pays me in money, and I, again, have little utilize for it.
I have my own mech to keep me company, although it doesn’t feel particularly special compared to the superhuman feats that characters in these types of games are capable of anyway. That’s not Lightyear Frontier’s fault, but when I’m used to being able to swing an axe a few times and smash something, it doesn’t really matter if I’m in a giant metal suit instead – you can do that if you’re ever away from your mech anyway. It’s nice to be able to fly low distances and understand why you’re able to carry massive amounts of stone and iron, but other than that, it’s basic to forget about it, except when my stomping scares the local wildlife.
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And then there’s PIP-3R. PIP-3R is a satellite that orbits the planet, and after decades of loneliness, they’re just content to have someone to talk to. Or at least someone to talk to, since you can’t talk back. And, look, I have a ton of patience for companion characters – I don’t even have a problem with Navi – but I know how it is, and I fully expect the first patch to drastically reduce PIP-3R’s voice lines.
Other than those three, it’s just me and the planet. Wake up, farm, craft, explore, build, sleep. It’s both meditative and fast-paced. Lightyear Frontier also has a four-player co-op mode, which I imagine would be a lot of fun, but for me it was a blessed time listening to podcasts alone. (That, by the way, is the PIP-3R’s solution, though I’m a little unhappy because the rest of the sound design is all the crunchy, soil-turning, moss-grinding efficiency you could want.)
I can imagine that co-op play wouldn’t take too long now, though. It only took me about eight hours to reach the end of the game’s Early Access story by myself. That meant clearing out six areas of the map, each similarly decorated with colorful trees and minerals but with subtle differences like pine trees over broadleaf or more valuable metal ores, upgrading my mech a few times with a more powerful watering cannon and a vacuum cleaner to clear weeds in order to do so. There were a few more things I could have done—I finished about halfway through the upgrade tree—but without the clearing, that probably would have been quick too.
On the other hand, those who don’t play at the reviewer’s pace may want to get used to the slower pace of farming and exploration that could theoretically go on forever. One aspect of this slower playstyle that I didn’t touch on at all was the chance to decorate. Almost half of the building menu and even more of the trading opportunities are aesthetic: campfires, fences, potted plants, etc. I also fell asleep every night in the original little tent I made instead of building something bigger. Of course, spending resources on these things would mean less to invest in my mech and machines, which would make the whole game slower.
But my desire to see the story end in time to write this review wasn’t the reason I didn’t engage with these systems. And I’m glad the story isn’t over, because it means I can talk about a question that’s been on my mind without getting into any spoilers.
The thing is, building anything in Lightyear Frontier felt a bit mean. The planet is gorgeous; all twisted, multicolored trees and flowering shrubs and sparkling crystals. Rattling my mech’s spiky arm to collect them as resources and utilize them to forge giant machine parts didn’t feel like a particularly cozy-wholesome-playing experience. I tucked my entire farm away in the shadow of a cliff and kept it as diminutive as possible, decorations the last thing on my mind.
The game feels like it’s trying to subvert that – but I’m not sure. It starts with a stark statement: “The land is no good anymore.” It certainly seems like the weird goo and invasive weeds that have to be cleared from each fresh area are somehow connected to the mysterious man-made ruins. The fact that they appear over your farm every few days certainly means that you’re also disturbing something.
But then I go back to the daily cycle. I need wood. I plant at least a few trees to replace the ones I’ve chipped, so that’s okay, right? I need minerals, and they regenerate so quickly that it’s no problem to take in as much as I want – even faster if you feed the local animals, in a cause-and-effect relationship I don’t really understand, beyond its permission of the greedy player. So that would probably be okay, right? If I fenced in my farm. If I beautified it. If I lived out my cottagecore dreams on this pretty planet that seems to have been made just for me?
Lightyear Frontier asks enough questions to make you uncomfortable, and then it lulls you into a loop with such forward momentum that you can’t do anything about them. And that momentum is fun, and its questions leave me curious, which is a good thing for an Early Access farming game. I’ll probably come back to enjoy those chilly, resource-sucking days and find out what the game has to say about them. The question remains, though, whether I’ll ultimately be satisfied.
This review is based on the version of the game provided by the creators of Frame Break.
