Gone are the days of cows and chickens in farming sims, I'm replacing my farm animals with yokai in Tales of Seikyu

A deer-like creature walking up a hill to a blossom tree in Tales of Seikyu — (Image credit: ACE Entertainment)

Fantasy farming simulator Tales of Seikyu strays from the traditional formula of raising cows, chickens, and sheep, and instead puts you into a world of yokai legends. Of course, you'll still have the perks of cultivating crops and collecting resources from livestock, but there's a lot more than meets the eye once you start to explore. From humanoid otters to sentient slimes that help around the farm, there are many quirks to get stuck into and creatures to befriend in what is scheduled to be a refreshing addition to the farming simulator space.

Our new endeavor into the farming realm takes place in the town of Seikyu. At a surface level, the location seems pretty normal. It's got all the enchantment of a stunning fantasy village brimming with natural beauty and plenty of nooks and crannies to explore. But, once you start looking a little closer, especially in the trailer for the game, you'll start to notice more oddities. Seikyu is home to the weird and wonderful, and it's our job to explore and befriend whatever we can.

The more critters you encounter, the more skills and abilities you unlock along the way. So not only will you be responsible for restoring and renovating a derelict farmland, you will also be tasked with learning about the abundant world of folklore around you. Tales of Seikyu is home to 30 characters with in-depth storylines that unfold as you develop relationships with them, spilling secrets about the world and assisting you on your adventure.

To make exploring all the more exciting, you'll also have the ability to shape-shift, which you gain through magical masks rewarded for puzzle-solving. As a crow tengu, you'll be free to soar through the skies and zip around quickly, or scale cliff faces as a nimble dryad. Gone is the need for horses as a faster way to get around the map, and these two skills appear to be just a taste of what we will be able to unlock the further we delve into Seikyu.

Tales of Seikyu - a player stands in a field of rose bushes and harvests one — (Image credit: ACE Entertainment)

We've only seen a brief example of these skills in action, as shown in the most recent trailer released for Tales of Seikyu. As we get closer to a possible release, we're expecting more details on these skills and possibly a spotlight on what other skills we can unlock. For now, though, these modes of traversal are pretty exciting for those of us who have exhausted ourselves running around on-foot in the vast majority of farming simulators.

But with all that said, Tales of Seikyu currently only has a release window of 2024, so sadly we still have a little while to go before we can delve into the world of farming with yokai. But, you can wishlist the game on Steam now to keep up to date with any future updates or trailers that expose more of what is to come from the enchanting adventure that awaits.

Kara is an evergreen writer. Having spent four years as a games journalist guiding, reviewing, or generally waffling about the weird and wonderful, she’s more than happy to tell you all about which obscure indie games she’s managed to sink hours into this week. When she’s not raising a dodo army in Ark: Survival Evolved or taking huge losses in Tekken, you’ll find her helplessly trawling the internet for the next best birdwatching game because who wants to step outside and experience the real thing when you can so easily do it from the comfort of your living room. Right?