We know the trope of the cozy life sim: you've inherited a tumbledown farmhouse from a distant relative and need to grow crops, make friends with the locals, and restore the farm to its former glory.
That's not quite the case in Crop, the "gritty farming simulator" developer Carbonara Games described to me as "Stardew Valley meets Twin Peaks" when I saw a demo of it last month at GDC. First of all, you're not inheriting your farm from a beloved family member: you've just crawled naked out of the trunk of a crashed car in the woods, wandered onto some farmland, and found the previous farmer dead.
The way you learn to use your shovel in the tutorial is by digging the previous farmer's grave. Welcome to Crop!
Despite the grim setting and horror elements, there's plenty that fans of cozy farm games will recognize in Crop's gameplay loop. You can sell the crops you grow, you can meet and interact with people who live in the town, you can set up irrigation systems and improve the soil by composting, and an unfinished bridge at the edge of your property can be repaired to unlock a new area.
But there's the lingering question of why you'd been stuffed into the trunk of ...
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