➤ Roots of Pacha, the review of the life simulator in the primitive world 🕹

Not just a farming simulator: Roots of Pacha, the game created by the small team at Soda Den, explores the ideas that shaped the beginnings of humanity.

The history of farm simulators is marked by the desire to escape the daily routine, a characteristic that unites both the protagonists of video games such as Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, as well as fans of this genre. In prehistory, however, the rural life of hunter-gatherers was not an escape from everyday life, but rather an obligation and also a continuous discovery: the small team of Soda Den, formed by ten people and divided between California and Argentina, decided to locate its Raíces de Pacha in a place fruit of the imagination, but with many contacts with the tribal life that, in recent millennia, have defined the course of human history.

Roots of Pacha is a lot like Stardew Valley, but manages to create its own distinctive and often original path. This happens mainly thanks to the mechanics of IDEA, capable of creating a strong sense of progression and radically change the entire town, and not just our protagonist's farm. The adventure is very choral, based on collaboration with the rest of the tribe members, on the fulfillment of rituals and on the increase in the prosperity of the clan, which is decisive in allowing us to unlock new skills and areas to explore.

We tell you about this prehistoric life simulator in ours Pacha Roots Review.

Under the shadow of the Pacha Tree

Roots of Pacha, the review of the life simulator in the primitive world — Taming and raising animals is essential to progress in Roots of Pacha

After a simple editor, which allows you to choose the player character's body type, hairstyle and eye color, clothing and decorations - and is capable of creating avatars that are really beautiful to look at -, we begin to follow the events of a tribe of primitive men and women, told through dialogue (the images in each character's panels are beautiful) and cinematic sequences. The elder Tetih tells the younger ones the history of the group and how they came to settle in that place: the spirits, questioned by the shaman, had forced the tribe to move east, in search of a Pacha tree near which settle.

The connection with spirits and divinities remains alive throughout the adventure, which in a long flashback follows the history of the group and its development, in the name of new discoveries (agriculture, livestock and much more) for approximately forty hours of gaming. The narrated events, divided into days (as is tradition in the genre, it begins in a splendid spring) are strongly based on the need to cooperation and dialogue between the group members: overall, the story is much less "lonely" than other titles in the genre, such as Stardew Valley, and is full of events, surprises and rituals capable of keeping the players' involvement alive, marrying perfectly with the proposed game mechanics.

Harvest, sow, raise

What is surprising about Roots of Pacha is the Overabundance of possibilities offered to the player., both in the offline campaign and in multiplayer mode, combined with small tutorials that always make clear the mechanics implemented within the game. As the days go by, they introduce you new explorable areas and the cutscenes that open the days give the player little clues about what activities they might want to focus on. And the possibilities are always many: if at first it will be natural to concentrate on exploring the forests that surround the settlement to find seeds of various plants and experiment with their cultivation in our rudimentary farm, as you progress you will be encouraged to delve into mysteries. caves, fish, tame animals and build wells.

Everything happens gradually, of course, but Roots of Pacha days are always full of things to do. Compared to other farm simulators, there is a Strong simplification in the tools to use.: with a simple tonsil you can break rocks, pull out weeds and remove branches, thus expanding the space in which you can dedicate yourself to agricultural activities, and you can also catch the fish that populate the nearby waterways. Unfortunately, the fishing minigame is quite monotonous (you have to keep the cursor on the fish icon until the right moment, moving it if the animal notices us) and the same goes for theanimal domestication (the flute is played by pressing a key in time), but in general the activities are well thought out and, being very numerous, you never get bored. All this must be done paying attention to the stamina bar, which can be recharged by eating delicacies that can gradually become more complex: after all, part of humanity's progress also comes from the improvement of culinary technologies.

As we said, a characteristic that distinguishes Roots of Pacha is the strong attention to group dynamics and progress of the primitive community like an everything. The indicator of clan prosperity It is fueled by the contribution of all partners, and over time it will only increase, naturally also thanks to the contribution of our protagonist: collaborating with the supply of fish, fruits, vegetables and other goods collected thanks to our hard work is fundamental to Unlock improvements and new abilities for us and our companions. Even the observation of the surrounding world is essential to drive progress: for example, by watering the fields coming and going from the river and filling with our simple animal skin we can have the idea of building a well and realize it. with the help of another farmer. The dynamics created in this way are attractive and fun, without downtime, also thanks to the gradual expansion of the lands that the protagonist can explore. We didn't appreciate, at least at first, the challenges posed by the mysterious cave that becomes explorable after a few days, but fortunately the continuation of the adventure also made these sections more interesting.

A world to explore

Continuing the adventure will take us deeper and deeper into the forests, clearings and caves of the prehistoric world designed by Soda Den. Although the team is very small (only ten people), the developers were able to create a cohesive and beautiful world to see, colorful and varied, with simply excellent artistic direction. The menus are very reminiscent of those of Stardew Valley, while the rest of the interface is based on the protagonist's belt and is divided into a bag dedicated to seeds, another containing the tools of the trade and finally a grid dedicated to objects that are collected. working in the field or exploring the game world. The map is also clear and pleasant to look at at the same time; On a visual level, everything is very consistent with the prehistoric setting chosen by the team.

In the version we tested before launch there was no Spanish localization; we play Roots of Pacha English en. The sound design adequately accompanies the adventure in all its parts and is well thought out in both the effects and the music, which communicate the joy of living and discovering every corner of this uncontaminated world; We would like to point out that we occasionally experienced some audio glitches that completely eliminated sounds related to the protagonist's actions, but a restart of the game was always enough to eliminate the problem. They are more unpleasant occasional accidents, also because saving only occurs at the end of each day (exactly like in Stardew Valley) and this led us, in some cases, to lose our progress.

Conclusions

Tested version PC with Windows digital delivery Steam Holygamerz.com 7.5 Readers (5) 7.2 your vote

Roots of Pacha was built with skill and dedication by a small team and deserves your full attention: far from being a Stardew Valley clone, it offers a content-rich adventure full of heart, in the name of collaboration and progress. Without some technical problems and considering that, very often, rural life simulators "grow" over time also thanks to feedback from the gaming community (this was precisely the case with Eric Barone's masterpiece), we were surprised the very high quality of what Soda Den offers, despite the repetitiveness of some mini-games and an ineffective "hook" for the cave exploration sections. Roots of Pacha is definitely a product that you should have on your radar if you are passionate about the genre, and thanks to the excellent tutorials it can be an excellent experience to get closer to farming simulators.