This review is 4836 words the bottom of the page includes the video review that goes over the same information if it is easier for you :).
This game is rated for everyone 10+ it includes themes of crude humor, mild fantasy violence, and use of alcohol.
Echoes of the Plum Grove is an indie game made by Unwound Games, a husband and wife development team that was made in 2018. They also employ contractors to help with the development of their games and as far as i can tell their only game currently is Echoes of the Plum Grove. Now let me talk about the game itself, while going into what I like about the game, and what I’m not as fond of.
The game starts with the player and their friend getting on a ship moving to a new land to start a better life. Unfortunately not everything goes as planned and after a storm the ship is wrecked leaving the player to wash up on shore as the only survivor. Players are saved by the townsfolk and when they are woken up they are brought to their farm.
Players then more or less make their own story from that point. Eventually players are introduced to the more supernatural side of things. They meet the town’s witch and she as well as the player’s old friend introduces players to ghosts and later Limbo which is a place we’ll talk about later. Eventually the player is invited to join the coven between the town witch Astra and her sisters, another thing we’ll go over later.
And so far that’s mostly it! Players are the main drive of their own story from here on until they finish Limbo which I will leave you to figure out and see for yourselves.
This game is 2D and honestly compared to all the other farming sims I’ve played this one has the most unique artstyle. Everything in the game looks similar to the paper mario style if you’re familiar with that. It feels like you're a part of a picture book is the best way I can describe it. The characters, furniture, and animals are adorable and I love how silly they look when performing certain animations. They also tend to be extremely expressive. There are some aspects of 3D in this game most notably with structures and specific trees but they are textured in a way that it feels natural and normal for the world. I will go more into this later in the NPC section, but I feel like the art style and the lack of character sprites can make it a bit harder to feel as connected to some villagers.
Players can only fully customize their player character at the start. After the intro players can only really customize their hairstyle and outfit. Things such as hair and skin color are passed down from parents which will be touched on in a later section. When playing the game you can change your character’s emotions through a wheel which changes their facial expressions and sometimes how they walk. This works really well if you're really going into the story aspect and you want just another small feature that can help you feel a part of it.
Like a lot of farming games farming is of course the biggest part of the game and how you will make a majority of your money. Players are limited to planting what can be grown in that season. There are regular crops and trees players can plant. You can get seeds primarily by buying them off of other farmers, as gifts, and rewards in quests, and you can get seeds back after harvest. The crops you grow are likely to be your main source of income as you can sell them raw or use them to make things like food or other items such as wheat making flour. They are also used in Limbo.
I would like to make an important note here! Unlike almost every other farming sim the crops and everything else such as fish and food have a shelf life. These items expire after a few days. This essentially makes it impossible to hoard multiples of one crop or item, unless you turn this setting off. Generally this game has a lot of settings and features that make it hard to play especially when compared to other farming sims. These can all be turned off if you want a more casual experience or kept on for a more challenging one. I am making note of this now as it will be gone over in other sections as well.
Related to farming players can also have a plethora of farm animals. Animals are separated into three categories mostly so lets go over them quickly. Wild animals can be found at specific locations on the map depending on the time and season. When interacted with they give players items, for example if you pet the bear you can get a bear claw from it. Pets are animals that never die, they never have to be fed, and they kind of just run around the place. They don’t really do anything besides look cute. You can choose from multiple cats, dogs, and even pet pigs which admittedly is a big odd considering pet pigs are immortal, but livestock pigs aren’t. Finally we have livestock. They are split depending on if they live in the coop or barn. You can have chickens, geese, pigs, sheeps, cows, and goats. All these animals give you what your used to milk, eggs, and wool. Not many games allow you to have pigs as livestock because they essentially can’t produce anything…well except for one thing. As I have alluded to earlier your livestock in this game can die either from old age or.. by your own hands. Meat is used in a lot of recipes and to get meat you can either buy it from the butchers or you can slaughter your own animals. I’m gonna be real, I have yet to do this. I feel so bad whenever I think about it so I just have refused to. I have seen a lot of people wait to do this until their livestock is about to die anyway so if you feel bad about it like me that's probably your best bet.
Players can buy and craft tools and most items. Specifically for this section tools are the most important thing to go over as they are the only way to really play the game. Without disabling it every tool can and will break eventually as players use them over time. They have durability similarly to minecraft. When the durability is low players can have them repaired at the blacksmith for a small fee or they will break forcing you to buy or craft a new one. Almost every tool can break except for watering cans, lanterns, and tools for livestock.
I personally turn this setting and many others off as I use farming sims to calm down and to really chill out since I normally play games that are stressful or frustrating. (show rimworld and overwatch). However if you want an extra challenge then of course leave this setting and the others I will mention..
Like more recent farming sims this game also employs the use of skills that give players perks as they keep building them up. They are mostly pretty simple to level up.
The farming skill is likely one of the first you’ll level up. You of course increase this by farming specifically harvesting crops. You can also level it up by harvesting from your livestock such as shearing sheeps. With the perks you can either go down the crop or livestock paths. At level 5 you can either have a higher chance of producing high quality crops or you can choose to get more animal products from your livestock. At level ten the crop path allows you to either have your crops produce more yield or your trees to produce more. The livestock path either allows your animals to have more children or you can get more meat from butchering your animals.
The foraging skill is extremely easy to level up as you can mine, shake trees, or pick wild plants to level it up. There is the herbologist path and the miner path. At level 5 the herbologist allows more collectables to spawn and at level 10 you can either choose to have the collectables increase in quality or have double wood drops. At level 5 miners mine more ore from veins and at level 10 you can choose to either increase your tool durability or to have lanturn oil last longer. Lantern oil is of course used to light your lantern which lights up dark areas and it prevents you from taking the movement speed debuff when walking in the dark.
The social skill is leveled up by talking to villagers and interacting with them. There are two paths you can go down being the charismatic or haggler path. At level 5 the charismatic path allows you to get more relationship points from talking and gifting NPCs. Level 10 can either make it so your base social relationship is higher or you gain the ability to insult people twice in a day. At level 5 the haggler path gives you a 10% discount when buying items and at level 10 you can either make it so shops have more inventory or you can choose to receive gifts more often either from the mail or through talking.
The fishing skill that is leveled up by of course fishing who would have guessed. There isn’t really a neat way, that i can think of at least, to categorize these paths here so I will be calling them path A and B. Path A at level five increases your chance of catching two fish and at level 10 you can either choose to increase the quality of the fish you catch or increase your rod durability. Path B at level five reduces the time it takes for fish to bite and get caught. Level 10 can either increase your chance of catching rare fish or it can reduce fishing time even further.
Next is the crafting skill. Honestly I don’t care for this one as much, I haven’t really increased it yet and I honestly think there is a clear better choice. These paths are revolved around crafting or refining artisan goods. The crafting path, which imo is the worst one, allows you to craft items faster at level 5 and at level 10 you could either decrease building costs or you have a chance to preserve items when crafting. The artisan path at level 5 makes it so your refined artisan goods are higher quality and at level 10 you can either choose to have a chance at doubling refined items or refining takes less time.
Finally is the cooking skill. I don’t think I’ve leveled this skill up once honestly and you level it up by cooking any of the 112 recipes in the game. For this skill I also had a lot of trouble making path names so we’ll go with path A and B again. Path A at level 5 decreases cooking time and at level 10 you can choose to have a chance of doubling the cooked item or a chance to preserve the ingredients used in the recipe. Path B at level 5 increases cooked food quality and at level 10 can either make it so that food effects last longer or make it so your rate of hunger decreases.
Those are all the skills. There are some that I think are personally useless such as the crafting time one, but overall I'm glad they were included so there are a lot more options for people to customize their gameplay. An important thing to note is that when the player character dies their skill do not get passed down to their successor as instead you now have whatever skills that character had already built to that point.You kind of have to restart.
As I’ve explained more and more about this game you have probably noticed that this game has some features not seen in farming sims. Most notably you can die in various ways. You and other living things NPCs and livestock die of old age, poison, and disease. Players can die of hunger. You can kill NPCs and your livestock. As mentioned before items go rotten and expire. Possibly worst of all is that… you have to pay taxes every week and unlike real life the more money you have the more money you owe.
When NPCs die a funeral will be held that you can attend. This is just a quick little event meant to make the town feel more alive ironically enough. Most villagers die of old age or disease but as I mentioned before players can also take it upon themselves to kill villagers by gifting a death cake you buy off of the town witch. I haven’t done this yet in my game but I am very excited to when the time is right. When the player dies you choose one of your kids as an heir to continue on with gameplay. You keep your money and inventory, but as mentioned before your skills are lost. In the settings you can make yourself immortal to avoid this issue though. Livestock dying and items rotting are things I’ve already gone over in this video so now I unfortunately have to go over the scariest part. You are required to pay your taxes every week and it gets worse as taxes increase by 10 coins a week. Luckily like with almost everything else in this list you can turn taxes off in the settings.
Something I’m pretty sure you can’t turn off though is the effects in the game. A couple of farming games have effects but there usually aren’t negative ones. Many of the effects are buff, however there are a few annoying effects. Most are just to let you know of things such as how hungry you are, if it's too dark to see, if you're pregnant, and if you are falling ill or dying. However I have a specific effect that I feel does too much. The nauseated effect is very easy to avoid, but if you end up getting it by eating raw meat or taking the wrong medication, which can be confusing to use, it is honestly the most annoying thing in the world. You walk incredibly slow and about, it feels like every few seconds but I don’t have an exact number, your character stops for a few seconds to throw up. I get this is supposed to be challenging but I feel like this effect does too much in regard to how often it takes away control from your character. This effect also lasts for a long irl time. I have never wanted to play a different game more than when this happened.
I’m going to be real with y’all but I find it a bit hard to connect with the villagers in this game. When you first start the villagers are predetermined, but as villagers die, families are made, and more people move in it becomes more randomized between playthroughs. Villagers are assigned 3 traits and they are given a career which makes up most of their dialogue. I felt it hard to get attached to the characters because of this repetitive and sometimes stilted dialogue and weirdly enough I think the really simple artstyle and no talking sprites helped to enforce how disconnected I felt from the characters. While playing I have to make up my own story for each character I interact with and while that's fun I feel like it heavily hurts the game when it comes to the marriage aspect. To be honest with y'all here I don't really read what the NPCs have to say because it's never interesting. I found it hard to really pick a marriage candidate because of the lack of personality and simple look. I went based on who would be more useful and stuff like their hair color mainly.
I did like how villagers can marry each other and start their own families as it makes the town feel really alive. It really feels like if the player didn’t join the villagers would be able to develop their own stories and generations without us interacting. Any NPC can marry any NPC of any gender and no matter their gender they can get pregnant. This is apparently controversial and if you look up the game on google reviews you can see some people who obviously didn’t look into the game. Guy characters can marry guy characters and get pregnant. It's the same when it's two women. It’s just to ensure generations can continue and it allows players to get with whoever they like the most. The system handling NPC families is really great however I do have one issue with it though. As you can imagine with the very limited population and the constant marriages and births there is as you keep playing through multiple generations there is a high chance of incest occuring. I personally have not seen this happen as I haven’t played for many generations since I had my lifespan set to long, but one look on the reddit for the game tells you this issue is common. The only real way I know of players being able to fix this themselves is to just kill most of their town as when jobs are unfulfilled more people are brought in through the many ships that visit.
A big draw to this game is that you have to have a family so they can continue playing the game unless you turn off your character aging and are careful about disease and hunger. You can get married and start a family with any gender. When you get married your partner will move into your home after your ceremony. Eventually you can have kids with them or you can give adoption papers to any child NPC without a family. If you choose to have your own kids then you must feed them everyday and keep them happy. Babies can’t die or be taken away from you, but they do gain bad traits if they are unhappy. You can have up to 4 people living in your home at once. If your partner has a job you can collect money from them every day. You can choose whether to make your kids get jobs, help you on the farm, or if they go to school. If you choose to send them off to a job then you can collect money from them as well. When your children become adults you can either kick them out to make more room in your house or you can wait until they leave on their own.
There is a home decorating aspect of this game and it's pretty good. There is a wide range of furniture items, wallpapers, and flooring to decorate your house with. You can upgrade your home twice which increases the room in the home. I wanted to mention this quickly since I haven’t gone in depth with this aspect since it can get really expensive. I do want to note that all of the furniture is very cute due to the art style. Most of your furniture, wall paper, and flooring will come from the carpenter.
There are a few non season specific events and every festival is season and day specific. Weddings and funerals can happen any day that doesn’t already have an important event attached to it. You get invited if you know the people getting married or the person who died, but it isn't required and there isn’t anything you can do there except stand around until the event is over. These events are mainly for you to advance and create stories for the NPCs around you and your character. Every week has a Sunday market where villagers will gather in the town square to sell various items. Ships arrive every weekend and they bring valuable items to buy, disease, and visitors. The first weekend brings the Colonial ship, the second brings the Empire ship and the third brings pirates. Each of these ships bring different items to trade.
I would like to bring up the Secret Invite quest here. Spoiler warning but as I mentioned before the player is invited by Astra to join the coven consisting of her and her sisters. This meeting happens twice every year once on Spring 21st and the second time on Fall 21st. Here players are asked to choose between three options that last for two seasons where players can choose to curse villagers at random, have a blessing of fertility, or a good harvest.
Now onto the festivals which there are seven of. I personally don't like how they are split up though as Spring and Summer only have 1 festival while Winter gets 3. This can make spring and summer feel boring and empty while winter can feel too cluttered especially with how many deaths there usually are during that season. I think winter should get more festivals than the other seasons since you can’t really farm during then but I think the gap is a little bit too big here.
In Spring there is the fishing contest on the 13th where you try to catch as many fish as possible. Catching fish gives you fish coins which can be used to buy 3 items: a fish plush toy, a painting, and a rainbow fishing rod.
In Summer there is a bake off on the 13th. You don't need to bring ingredients here and you have to sign up before noon. You will be asked to cook specific recipes, but if you don’t know the recipe then just rotate the requests until you can make what the judges are asking for. If you win you get 500 coins, a blueberry cream cake, and its recipe.
In the fall there are two festivals. Fall 13th has Halloween. Kids will dress up and ask you for candy. Depending on how much you give out the mayor will send you a letter telling you how good or bad you did and how the kids of the town feel. Fall 20th is the day of the Harvest Festival where you can either enter a harvest or animal into the correlating contest. For the animal contest you enter one of your animals to compete. You get 500 coins and a turkey painting if you win. The harvest contest allows you to submit nine items for the competition. You can also gamble at the witch’s tent which is fun.
There are 3 festivals in the winter. On the 6th of Winter there is a crafting contest. The three judges give hints on what they would like you to craft and you are given a time limit to do so. If you win you get a certificate signed by the king. Winter 12 has the Winter Gala which allows you to gather cranberries for the mayor or you can keep them for yourself and it's mainly a social event where you can get recipes. If you submit cranberries to the mayor you are given cranberry punch and gold depending on how many you submit. There is also a Lantern festival which isn’t a major thing you can purchase a lantern to release into the sky and that's about it here.
I would finally like to go over Limbo. This is mostly end game so if you haven’t played and don’t want any spoilers I HIGHLY recommend you click off now. Limbo is an important part to the game’s story and works as a set of milestones for the player to complete. This section of the game is located in the witch, Astra’s, basement. There are six milestones, or pillars, for you to complete and they all correlate with the skills within the game. The pillars hold a pot and when you complete that pillar a plant grows. Completing each pillar reactivates the portal in the center which plays a special cutscene that I would rather not go into so you can see it for yourself.
Before I go into what the pillars need I would like to mention that there is another aspect to Limbo. In this area you will find ghosts of previous villagers and many of them have quests for you to complete similar to living villagers. Here your reward will mainly be Mana. Mana is used to create potions in the witch's hut and they give effects or do things that help the player. Potions need specific ingredients and mana to be made. Their effects can range from giving you status effects like speed to teleporting you to places such as Limbo or the caves.
Now going over the pillars and what you need to do for each of them. Let's start with the three easiest to complete. The Social Pillar requires you to make 10 friends, get married, and complete 30 quests. You will likely complete this pillar without even trying. The foraging pillar requires you to have collected 567 foragables, donated 30 gold star foragables, and donated 10 gold ore. You have to try a bit more here since you have to physically donate items and unlock the mines. The last easy one in my opinion is the fishing pillar actually instead of the farming one. For the fishing pillar you need to have collected 28 fish, donated 30 gold star fish, and donated 10 lobsters. I'd say this is the last easy one because it's pretty easy to fish and you only need a fishing rod to do so.
The next three are a bit harder to complete. The farming pillar is the easiest of these three but it is harder than the last three due to the need for gold livestock products which of course needs happy, leveled livestock. For this pillar you need to have collected 26 crops, donated 30 gold star crops, and donated 30 gold star animal products. The crafting pillar needs you to donate 30 crafted resource items, collect 58 craftable items, and donate 10 craftable placeables. The final pillar is the cooking pillar. You need to learn 50 recipes, donate 20 gold star meals, and gifted 30 gold star meals to different villagers.
As I mentioned earlier you see a cutscene after reactivating the portal through completing all the milestones. This cutscene ends off the story’s game and plays the game’s credits. Don’t worry though! You won’t need to restart as you’re able to continue playing from here out, you just won’t have any game story or overarching goal to complete.
And that’s all I have to say! Overall I do enjoy echoes of the plum grove from time to time! I don’t play this game that often mainly because I really enjoy NPC interactions within games such as this, but I like the generations system it has going on. Unfortunately the generation system here isn’t unique to this game, so I don’t think it should be the main draw here, but it is good. It is overall fun to play. I highly recommend it for those who want a challenge as that's honestly the main draw to this game. Overall I’d say this game is at least worth a try if you’ve been interested in what I’ve said or if you want to play for the challenge or generation aspect, but if you want a more usual farming game then this one probably isn't for you mainly because of the dying and lack of NPC character.