Roots of Pacha (PC)
Feb. 18th, 2025 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAnother Stardew Valley-like, but in this one you’re playing as a member of a primitive tribe who were led by the spirits to the new land and must build their civilization there. Find wild seeds and wild animals and domesticate them as your tribe invents the trappings of civilization for you to use.
Instead of money, the game tracks your contribution and the tribe’s overall growth (which will grow steadily even if you do nothing), and your contribution level also functions as a “bank account” to get things from NPCs. (Unless you really like decorative pots and extra outfits, you’re going to end up swimming in mostly-useless cash really quickly.) The fetch quests are initiated by NPCs having “ideas”, so they’ll ask for ingredients and reward you with the next technological innovation. The Community Center equivalent is the Pyramid, where you and the tribe unlock achievements to advance. It feels like there’s much less actual freedom in the order you do things than some other games of this style—you’re beholding to the tribe’s overall advancement and idea generation. (And to your progress in the caves, where totem spirits gate the metal upgrades.) A lot of things are double-unlock or predicated on earlier ideas.
Interestingly, you start off doing almost every task with a sharpened rock (chopping, mining, clearing, digging, fishing) but eventually get specialized tools that are better at each job. Also interestingly, there’s no combat or hostile creatures at all: Animals ignore you unless you tame them with your flute. You can send a tamed animal to be butchered (a toggleable option—you can just release them instead) but otherwise meat is acquired via traps you set on the Savanna that have meat in them the next day—harm to animals is completely abstracted.
Fishing is completely different from most games of this type: You’re spear-fishing rather than line-fishing. You stand in the water and watch for fish and then track them until the meter fills up and you can stab them. Fish can then be dried, smoked, fermented or pickled for increasing rewards. Pickling is only worthwhile for the really expensive rare fish, because you need to ferment grain or fruit juice into beer or wine and then turn that into vinegar as a second ingredient for pickling. Cooked food is pretty much only for using yourself—it doesn’t add value and sometimes even loses value versus the raw ingredients, but it’s great for refilling your stamina. The game doesn’t have any stamina increases except from one of the accessories you can wear, so getting through the mines particularly requires packing snacks.
Automation for your farm is done in an amusing classic way: One of the last ideas you unlock is a school, and you get “learning stations” for your farm. If you pay for materials to stock them, the children of the village will come and pet your animals and water your crops for you. There’s also a water wheel that unlocks late in the game that lets you automate juicing, grinding or spinning; which your character otherwise has to stand at a station and do manually.
Like many games in this genre, all of the romanceable characters are functionally bisexual and your character’s gender is irrelevant. Babies are made via magic statue regardless of the parents’ genders. Most interesting is that there a monogamy toggle—you can choose whether forming a “union” with one character stops you from dating any of the others. Regardless, unlike Sun Haven, none of the achievements are gated behind romancing multiple characters, so it’s entirely your choice. (You actually only need three good friends—one in each tribe—to unlock all of the friendship achievements.)
On that topic, the achievements are a mixed bag. You can hit a lot of them early and playing through the “main plot” (fully raising the pyramid and doing all the cave challenges) gets you about two-thirds of them, but then the rest are completionist and have a few annoying gates. You can’t grow every plant, get plant knowledge to 5 for every plant, or cook every dish until you unlock Teff, which requires randomly getting alfalfa as a trade option and offering it to the Horse totem to unlock a secret area...and then only grows in summer. This is despite the fact that you can grow any season’s plants in the Jungle farm once it unlocks—you can’t acquire Teff seeds in any other season. I was pretty sure from the start I wasn’t going to extensively breed animals to get every achievement, but the fact that I would need to push through another half-year just for that one unlock for achievements I otherwise had 99% complete was really frustrating.
As of this writing we’re still waiting on the 1.3 update, which will apparently allow you to visit the homes of the other two tribes and add some more features. So perhaps I’ll let this be “done” until that drops, and then I’ll pick the game back up to collect Teff and do the bonus content at the same time.
Overall: This was familiar gameplay with some cute quirks; not perfect but clever enough to be a little different. If you want more Stardew Valley, it’s another fun option.
Instead of money, the game tracks your contribution and the tribe’s overall growth (which will grow steadily even if you do nothing), and your contribution level also functions as a “bank account” to get things from NPCs. (Unless you really like decorative pots and extra outfits, you’re going to end up swimming in mostly-useless cash really quickly.) The fetch quests are initiated by NPCs having “ideas”, so they’ll ask for ingredients and reward you with the next technological innovation. The Community Center equivalent is the Pyramid, where you and the tribe unlock achievements to advance. It feels like there’s much less actual freedom in the order you do things than some other games of this style—you’re beholding to the tribe’s overall advancement and idea generation. (And to your progress in the caves, where totem spirits gate the metal upgrades.) A lot of things are double-unlock or predicated on earlier ideas.
Interestingly, you start off doing almost every task with a sharpened rock (chopping, mining, clearing, digging, fishing) but eventually get specialized tools that are better at each job. Also interestingly, there’s no combat or hostile creatures at all: Animals ignore you unless you tame them with your flute. You can send a tamed animal to be butchered (a toggleable option—you can just release them instead) but otherwise meat is acquired via traps you set on the Savanna that have meat in them the next day—harm to animals is completely abstracted.
Fishing is completely different from most games of this type: You’re spear-fishing rather than line-fishing. You stand in the water and watch for fish and then track them until the meter fills up and you can stab them. Fish can then be dried, smoked, fermented or pickled for increasing rewards. Pickling is only worthwhile for the really expensive rare fish, because you need to ferment grain or fruit juice into beer or wine and then turn that into vinegar as a second ingredient for pickling. Cooked food is pretty much only for using yourself—it doesn’t add value and sometimes even loses value versus the raw ingredients, but it’s great for refilling your stamina. The game doesn’t have any stamina increases except from one of the accessories you can wear, so getting through the mines particularly requires packing snacks.
Automation for your farm is done in an amusing classic way: One of the last ideas you unlock is a school, and you get “learning stations” for your farm. If you pay for materials to stock them, the children of the village will come and pet your animals and water your crops for you. There’s also a water wheel that unlocks late in the game that lets you automate juicing, grinding or spinning; which your character otherwise has to stand at a station and do manually.
Like many games in this genre, all of the romanceable characters are functionally bisexual and your character’s gender is irrelevant. Babies are made via magic statue regardless of the parents’ genders. Most interesting is that there a monogamy toggle—you can choose whether forming a “union” with one character stops you from dating any of the others. Regardless, unlike Sun Haven, none of the achievements are gated behind romancing multiple characters, so it’s entirely your choice. (You actually only need three good friends—one in each tribe—to unlock all of the friendship achievements.)
On that topic, the achievements are a mixed bag. You can hit a lot of them early and playing through the “main plot” (fully raising the pyramid and doing all the cave challenges) gets you about two-thirds of them, but then the rest are completionist and have a few annoying gates. You can’t grow every plant, get plant knowledge to 5 for every plant, or cook every dish until you unlock Teff, which requires randomly getting alfalfa as a trade option and offering it to the Horse totem to unlock a secret area...and then only grows in summer. This is despite the fact that you can grow any season’s plants in the Jungle farm once it unlocks—you can’t acquire Teff seeds in any other season. I was pretty sure from the start I wasn’t going to extensively breed animals to get every achievement, but the fact that I would need to push through another half-year just for that one unlock for achievements I otherwise had 99% complete was really frustrating.
As of this writing we’re still waiting on the 1.3 update, which will apparently allow you to visit the homes of the other two tribes and add some more features. So perhaps I’ll let this be “done” until that drops, and then I’ll pick the game back up to collect Teff and do the bonus content at the same time.
Overall: This was familiar gameplay with some cute quirks; not perfect but clever enough to be a little different. If you want more Stardew Valley, it’s another fun option.
