Deiland is a Kickstarter-funded game that was developed and published back in 2016 by Chibig which is available on a variety of platforms. As of April 2021, the Nintendo Switch is the most recent for this game to call home. You play as Arco, a young prince who is the lone resident of a small planet named Deiland. This quaint and expressive action RPG will take you through his day to day life through the seasons as he farms, crafts, and fights off the occasional scoundrel to protect his livelihood. All the while, various visitors from beyond the stars will visit Deiland to assist Arco in not just his survival, but progressing through the game’s narrative.

Star Gazing While Living Off the Land

A single sentence summary of Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition would be Stardew Valley-light from the perspective of Super Mario Galaxy. The incredibly small planet that the majority of the game takes place on can be circumnavigated in a few steps. As such, the point of view places Arco in the center of the screen, and moving the left stick activates his running animation. But from your perspective, it looks as though he’s running in place and the entire planet is rotating under his feet. Since Arco is only ten years old, there won’t be any romantic relationships built between him and any of the colorful cast. This puts the focus in other places that work for the themes of this game, like self discovery.

Controlling Arco is super easy as the ‘A’ Button interacts with most things on your planet. Mining, harvesting, and crafting are all triggered by this button. With certain tools equipped, the ‘Y’ Button opens up a menu specific to that tool. For example with the hammer, pressing ‘Y’ opens the menu that allows you to construct such things as fences, wells, and barns once you learn how to build them. The ‘Y’ Button is how you’ll plant anything outside of the farm area with your garden hoe. The ‘X’ Button will zoom out the camera, allowing you to rotate that Kaio-sama planet sized celestial body and view the entire surface. This feature has a number of uses. Occasionally meteorites will collide with the pocket planet Deiland, rotating it allows you to control where they land. If they are allowed to touch down on your farm it could be disastrous. And in the case of rain storms, zooming out with ‘X’ can allow you to control where the rain falls. The Left Stick rotates the planet and the right stick moves the clouds. Not only can this water your crops and trees, but this is an easy way to refill any of your wells if you’ve exhausted the water from them. But be aware that some rain storms will bring lightning. Letting a bolt to strike your farm is akin to a meteor collision. The ‘X’ Button will zoom the camera back in when you’re done. Left and right on the D-Pad will scroll through your tools. A hammer for building and mining, an axe for chopping down trees for wood and disassembling any structures you’ve built, a hoe for gardening, and a staff for casting magic. Down on the D-Pad brings up a menu of your current quests and up brings up the main menu with everything else. Up on the D-Pad is where you go when you want to see what’s in your inventory, Arco’s status, and how far along the game’s calendar you are. The Plus and Minus buttons both do the same thing: they open up the prompt that asks if you want to quit to the main menu.

In the upper lefthand corner of the screen are three bars: red, blue, and yellow. The red represents health, the blue is Arco’s stamina, and the yellow shows his gained experience towards his next level up. Next to those bars is a little symbol of an apple with a progress bar that wraps around it. This represents how hungry Arco is. If he gets too hungry, it’ll drain his health. The health bar is self explanatory. Take damage while fighting the baddies and this goes down. Eating food is the easiest way to regain health, since farming is a core mechanic to Deiland. You can eat the raw ingredients for small boosts in health and towards Arco’s hunger, but the real benefits are found in cooking the meals you’ll learn throughout the game. There is a dedicated health potion that’s worth stocking up on. The blue bar decreases as Arco does his day to day activities. Things like farming and mining will deplete it the quickest. If it drains completely, Arco won’t be able to do anything until he sleeps. Sleeping is also how you’ll level up once that third bar is filled. There are four stats that can be increased with each level up: strength, intelligence, agility, and stamina. Each having their own benefits in game, from increasing Arco’s strength in battle to increasing how much he can do before needing sleep.

Everything in this game tends to go pretty quick. Most crops will grow within a day or two in game time without any interference from you or the weather. The calendar itself is only twenty-eight days; seven days for each of the four seasons. What crops you can grow, as well as when the trees and bushes will bear seeds or berries, is determined by the season. Because of how fast the days can pass, it’s a good idea to be conscious of when crops are in season so they can be properly harvested in time. A new day also brings the chance for one of the game’s NPC’s to come planet-side. There will be the sound of a ship’s thrusters entering orbit, with a prompt in the upper righthand corner to press the X button to grant the visitor permission to touch down and where they should land. Each visitor brings new quests and new items to purchase, as well as a catchy tune that is unique to each one. Of course you can also sell to them. You’ll notice that some items in the sell list will have a star next to them with one NPC but not the others. The starred items will sell more to that particular person. These people are also how Arco learns to craft more things.

At the onset, Arco’s home starts off as a tent with a very basic forge. As it expands with the quests you complete, you gain access to a workshop to build more complex items and materials, a kitchen for cooking better food, and a laboratory for mixing a variety of concoctions. This is where you’ll take something like cotton and turn it into rope or fabric that are used for a variety of structures around the planet. Improving your tools in the forge allows for more items to be crafted, which creates a kind of synergy that encourages you to explore all the gameplay features available. Materials for the crafting are mostly wood and stone, although some of the stronger tools and more sophisticated structures will call for some kind of metal. Trees are your best source for wood and can only grow around a water source, like a well or the planet’s lake. Mining can get you any of the stones or metals but will quickly drain Arco’s stamina, as mentioned. As you mine, you’ll occasionally collect crystal fragments. The amount you have is displayed in the upper left right next to your hunger meter. There are two places where you’ll find these more than just pounding away at an average rock: from the meteorites that rain onto the planet’s surface or from mining underground. Their use is primarily in combat, although having them will aid in completing a couple quests.

Like many games of its ilk, you can fish while on Deiland, although its execution may not be the most user friendly. Once you make a fishing rod and get larva for bait, you can fish in the lake. Activating the mini game is easy enough. You can control where the lure goes in the water with the left stick. Move it to the mouth part of the fish shadow in the water to start it up. A bar appears across the bottom of the screen, a portion of which is colored blue. A cursor runs the length of the bar, indicating which of the four face buttons you need to press to successfully reel in a fish. This leaves a very small window to pull this off properly. Increasing the rod’s level makes this easier, but it’s still a challenging approach to a common game mechanic.

Of all the mechanics in the game, combat seems to be the least flushed out. You can fight that barehanded or with any of your tools, the hammer and the axe being the most effective with enemy type determining which of the two is better in any given situation. Knowing which to use is a matter of trial and error, however. Hit detection is also incredibly lax. You can be laughably far from an enemy and your physical attack will still connect. On the flip side, you can be right in front of one and get the “missed” prompt instead of the numerical value representing the amount of damage your attack did. Just bear in mind these same rules apply to the baddies, as well. After a few hours of gameplay, once the story begins presenting itself, Arco will receive the ability to forge a magic staff from Locke the traveling magician. This opens you up to the area of combat where you’ll most likely stay in for the rest of the game. A fire spell is the first you receive, and most baddies are weak to it. The crystals you’ve been collecting up until this point that have been used to craft glass bottles and will continue to collect will serve as the fuel for your magic spells. Casting fire magic is as easy as pressing the ‘A’ Button when prompted to when the baddie enters your line of sight. Since the late game enemies are expectedly tougher and do substantial damage to Arco, even despite the constant leveling up, magic will be the way to go once you gain access to it.

Written in the Stars

Upon first booting up the game and starting a new file, you’re met with an opening cinematic that is a series of beautifully illustrated still frames. You see the vastness of space with nearby planets and the far off twinkle of stars. A lone crystal of unknown origins rockets through the cosmos towards a tiny, fertile rock of a planet. Just above the surface, the crystal transforms into a boy donning a long, red scarf. And from here, you take control of the boy, your first task being to gather berries for sustenance by the lake. Once you do, you receive your first visitor. She’s a woman named Mun who is part of something called the Interstellar Patrol. She teaches you how to craft a hoe for gardening, and your adventure begins there. As mentioned, it’ll be a few hours before anything from the story truly starts to show itself. Arco will say a random, ambiguous line in his day to day life, or strange messages will appear when he sleeps. It’s not until Locke teaches you how to build a staff and Mun takes you to a snow covered planet that things really begin to open up to you in that respect. It’s then that you learn that Arco is a prince and the guardian of the crystal core of Deiland. It’s his princely lineage that allows him to cast magic, and if he stays offplanet too long he begins to grow weak. Aside from a strange, masked person who is attacking Arco’s friends, this is really all that is given to you for the story until the late game. As you uncover more details about the narrative, Arco discovers more about himself along with you. His childish optimistic approach to life is why he is able to befriend people who may not necessarily like each other in the lore of the story. It also makes him an enjoyable character to follow through his journey.

Shoot for the Moon

At the end of the day, Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition is a great, short experience. It may be more linear and not as content heavy as other games of the same ilk, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This could make a good entry point for someone who has always been curious about an Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon but never got around to picking one up. The controls are basic and responsive. The music is fun and fitting to the aesthetic of the game. The only real negatives to Deiland are a handful of glitches that pop up, like not being able to choose the sleep option in the menu from the house menu. But fixing that is as easy as quitting to the menu and reloading. And since the game autosaves after almost everything, there’s virtually no fear in losing any progress. The other negative is that not everything is entirely explained. The game will hold your hand through almost everything then leave you in the dark about other things until it’s ready to relinquish the information, like how to empty the mine cart. But overall, these far from detract from any enjoyment to be had from this indie title.