Have you seen Clarksons Farm? For the uninitiated, it's a UK TV series about a 60-something TV personality who turns his hand at "farming" and makes a complete hash of it. On the plus side, it highlights farmers' plight and the gruelling, non-stop nature of their profession.

Across the Valley is the cutest, warmest, cartoony version of farming I have ever witnessed and truth be told it's a wolf in Sheep's clothing when it comes to being forgiving.

A Basic Aesthetic But Rich In Resource Management

Coming from the same developers of Konrads Kittens, the graphic style in Across the Valley is very warm, idyllic, and wholesome. From the gently swaying grass to the blue skies, everything is bathed in warm, summery day-light that feels soothing and inviting. Objects and animals are slightly cell shaded and have a nice feel to them and how you can interact with them.

The soundscape crafted by this title is very basic, with light wind and rustling in the backing track, minimal farmyard sounds here and there as you would expect, and the noises associated with each task you perform such as watering plants or chopping your crops, but apart from that it's a little sparse overall.

The controls are equally rudimentary but thankfully incredibly intuitive. Point where you want to go and press one trigger to teleport, point at what you want to pick up and press a different trigger to grab it. Movements are performed by doing their exact real-life counterpart motions, so things like digging, hoeing, watering, sowing, and most importantly petting are all instinctive and precisely as you would want them to feel. The haptics in the VR2 Sense controllers also responds pleasingly to you patting an animal on the bonce or banging your tools around the scenery.

Spinning Plates And Making (Animal) Mates

I understand Farming is a grind, no doubt, but I wasn't prepared for the mental gymnastics of having to embed myself in such a pattern-driven, repetitious, slog. The irony is that this is technically realistic enough that had I put this amount of kinetic energy towards something, anything, IRL I would have something physically tangible to show for it by now.

Each day begins with a beautiful sunrise, the soothing sounds of the dawn chorus, and it gradually proceeds to spiral into an array of tasks that you have to plug away at in specific order so that you can become adept in the farming lifestyle. Each day is like spinning plates, with each proceeding day adding on one or more additional activities that you must not neglect to do else you will feel the wrath of nature: and have to nuke your farm from space.

Before you get too excited: no, sadly you can't.

You start out with daily tutorials that convey the order of things required to flourish on your land, from cultivating seeds to feeding and caring for your animals and selling your harvest for profits that you can use to expand your farm. Sometimes though, even the simplest of tasks, such as going to the message board each day can become frustrating when you're accidentally teleported outside of the screen, or into an object by the game. I came across a few annoying bugs during my time playing Across the Valley, and one actually prevented me from exiting the game back to the PS5 UI at all.

My initial daily pattern was as so: plough a decayed plot ready for seed, feed chick, water chick, pet chick, buy seed, plant seed, sleep.

Day two was similar, with the addition of clearing weeds, watering the previous day's seed sprouts, tending to the chick by ensuring they had fresh water and then going to sleep.

Day three saw me intensely harvesting all my crops, selling them to the cart, obtaining more seeds, preparing another plot, and sleeping. I felt like I was speedrunning this game by flying back to bed each day as soon as I possibly could, excited to see what the next day would hold!

Day four saw me wake up, stretch my arms out wide ready to embrace the day and then massively FREAK OUT because I realised I had forgotten about my chick the previous day. How could I! How was she?! It was all cool, after a little pet on the head, some water and grain, she was all good, and I had filled her heart meter. My goodness, such a relief, I mean: could you imagine the virtual carnage?

Rewarding But Demanding

After a few days, I was hoeing, sewing, and growing my farm to epic proportions. With enough harvested produce you can purchase new plots to expand your varieties of veg. Expand your farm further, collect those coins and eventually you can purchase pigs, sheep and cattle that you have to keep alive and clean up their copious messes. Before long you're neck deep in repetitious chore-like activities, and explicit customer orders (that pay double!), but there is more than a glimmer of satisfaction knowing you've struck the perfect balance of labour and progression and you are finally in the swing of things: you're a gosh darned fully fledged farmer!

Get it wrong and you have the walk of shame to your various patches that have dried up, died and need clearing down before you can restart the process on that specific stock item. While the motions and actions can feel immersive, it's extremely basic in their execution and some actions, such as hoeing for example, feel awful to enact, dragging along a wonky yet seemingly predisposed line, and shovelling can be completed by just stabbing at the soil in the right areas, which feels like lazily implemented mechanics.

Across the Valley is a quaint little simulation that lets you feel the occupation that is farming. With a variety of crops and animals to collect and interact with in the several stages of their life cycles, you really get a taste of country vitality. Sure it's resource management to the max, there is no fancy graphics or foveated rendering, plus the game can be very repetitive; but if you're into farming, then Across the Valley is about your only option if you have a PS5 and the PSVR2 set up!