Roots of Pacha, a cozy communitarian game

July 31, 2024 9:37 AM

Roots of Pacha is a cozy game in the vein of Stardew Valley. What sets it apart is a strong communitarian vibe where you are one member of a community working together to improve their village.

Most farming games have a capitalist grounding where you grow crops to make money to buy tools to grow more crops. Roots of Pacha is more communitarian. You give your produce to a communal stash; neighbors notice and give you tools so you can grow more to contribute. Everyone's contributions combine to grow the village’s prosperity. Really that’s a trick of the writing: in the game mechanics contributions are just a currency and prosperity is experience points. But the shift in framing makes all the difference for engagement. This emphasis on community continues through in most of the game mechanics, particularly more complex social relationships.

The game has the usual SDV mechanics: pets, livestock, fishing (with a unique minigame), a cave where you break rocks, relationships between players with gift giving and romance. The $330,000 they raised on KickStarter helped them build a high quality indie game that’s available on all major gaming platforms. Today is the 1.2 release which adds features like schools for children, wedding locations, and more ways for your pet to help around the farm. The 1.3 release is already planned.

Bonus links: official Wiki (spoilers), the subreddit, and /r/cozygamers.

posted by Nelson (9 comments total)

Hey, anything that helps people visualize the promise of communism is cool in my book.
posted by confabulous at 10:28 AM on July 31 [3 favorites]

This looks neat, but I play these sorts of games with my partner on the same TV. So, we'll continue playing Baldur's Gate until Stardew Valley's 1.6 comes to XBox.
posted by tkinvt at 10:53 AM on July 31 [1 favorite]

I didn't find this game to have quite the hold on me that Stardew Valley does, which for whatever reason, has remained replayable to me across multiple saves and despite reaching the game's ostensible end state multiple times. But I played through Roots of Pacha at its 1.0 release, and found it fun and charming, and really appreciated the communitarian aspects of it. Definitely worth sinking some time into! The music and art are great, and the twist on standard cozy/farming game mechanics was neat.
posted by yasaman at 11:10 AM on July 31 [2 favorites]

I like the idea, but for my anxious+AuDHDer+PDAer 8-year-old (previously, previously) any game that causes people to spend 10+ hours a day on it is going to be a bad idea.

Need a game that cuts you off like a bartender after a while! Or even better, eases you off in a way that feels good and allows focusing on other things.
posted by splitpeasoup at 11:12 AM on July 31 [1 favorite]

Need a game that cuts you off like a bartender after a while! Or even better, eases you off in a way that feels good and allows focusing on other things.

I wonder if this is worth passing on to the developers. There are lots of parents that (a) would like to limit kids screen time and (b) don't want to fight about it. Seems very possible to make a version that requires bedtime for everyone: it'd be even neater if the parents could specify the hours when the game was in sleep-mode.
posted by Silvery Fish at 1:50 PM on July 31 [1 favorite]

I don't think there's anything unique in this game that compels long play sessions other than it's fun to play. Maybe there's something to the core game loop, one in-game day every 15 minutes. One change in the recent patch is you can now save any time, it used to be you could only save it at the end of a game day. I'm grateful for that.
posted by Nelson at 2:04 PM on July 31

Does this game have couch coop on pc? If not, I see there is cross console support, maybe my husband and i will try that.
posted by rebent at 6:51 PM on July 31

This looks like an interesting iteration on this genre. I was big into Stardew for a while before figuring out that I have an "Optimizer" mentality that, in the long run, makes these games the opposite of fun for me. Despite the communitarian mindset, I do wonder if it's possible to make a game in the genre that isn't ultimately about optimization.

The inspiration for a stone-age experience comes from the book "The Clan of the Cave Bear."

I know this isn't the point per se, but Mrs. HeroZero has a PhD in anthropology and I am sure this game would make her head explode.
posted by HeroZero at 7:32 PM on July 31 [3 favorites]

Need a game that cuts you off like a bartender after a while! Or even better, eases you off in a way that feels good and allows focusing on other things.

I actually really like gacha games because of this - recently Zenless Zone Zero, but also Honkai Star Rail and Genshin Impact. These games are explicitly designed with structured playtime - for example, you only get 240 stamina units per day, so after spending it in about 15 minutes you run out. Even if you were a whale and wanted to spend money to get more stamina... I think you can only buy 360 at the maximum, so not much more than people playing for free. Once you're out of stamina... you're done. Close the app, there's nothing more you can do.

Same for their story events or random minigame events, they "release" the event but the gameplay is deliberately stretched out in 5 minute sessions once per day over 7 days.

There is usually larger episodic narrative content drop every 6 weeks that takes 3 to 6 hours to play through.

By strictly structuring the playtime, it also keeps everyone on the same even footing - so one person doesn't get too much ahead of another.

The games that really burn me out are western games like Diablo where there isn't any play structure, you might enjoy the game so much and end up playing 6-10 hours at a stretch, then find you've skipped ahead in the story or are too high level to party with your friends.

In fact I see some parallels to TV shows that release once per week (like Game of Thrones) where everyone you talk to was roughly at the same point in the story as it wasn't too hard to keep up with the weekly episodes, versus something like the Witcher which dumped the entire season at once and you had some people who binged the whole thing at once and then had no one to talk to about it except other bingers...
posted by xdvesper at 1:45 AM on August 1