Give Stardew Valley a giant tractor mech and you've got Lightyear Frontier
Cute 3D farming in space, coming next year
Peaceful farming sims are always in, really, and Lightyear Frontier is a) in space and b) has a mighty morphin' tractor mech. Digging up a gameplay trailer at today’s Xthesda Games Showcase, Lightyear Frontier is taking farming to the final frontier in Spring 2023 - but that frontier includes Game Pass on day one. This planet may be on the edge of the galaxy, but it has good wifi.
It also looks quite a bit like earth, don't it? A very picturesque and ideal version, with weird plants. The showpiece here is your big mech, obviously, which looks like a transformer that turns into a John Deere. In the trailer you see it change to have, for example, caterpillar tracks.
It is with this machine that you build your homestead, create raised beds and grow your crops. You can see the player using the mech to harvest resources from a tree by plugging some kind of wood-harvesting appendage into it, for example. Something I thought was cool was seeing a bird critter of some kind eating your crops, which suggests you need to do some kind of scarecrowing or protection of your stuff.
The trailer also makes mention of a mystery to uncover, although none of this will be too taxing, as the devs what to emphasise the relaxed vibes of Lightyear Frontier. Frame Break CEO Joakim Hedström says they're "taking aspects from what’s normally quite hectic games like shooters and survival games and recontextualising them in a chill and peaceful experience." I'm into that. I'm also into getting outta that big tractor every so often, to pretend to smell the roses and run the dirt between my fingers, but that might not be a thing here.
Not E3 2022 is in full-swing - see everything in our E3 2022 hub, as well as our complete round-up of everything announced at Summer Game Fest 2022. Many more big game showcases and streams are still to come this summer, so make sure you stay up to date with our summer games stream schedule.