I’ve tried and tried with previous entries, but the Farming Simulator series has never got its tractor claws into me.
The realistic, hands-on approach to running a farm felt so much more standoff-ish than its more lightweight cosy game cousins like my beloved Stardew Valley.
And yet here I am, overwhelmed by the daily grind, trapped in a polluted concrete jungle and yearning for a life closer to nature. Shouldn’t Farming Simulator be everything I’m looking for right now?
With the release of Farming Simulator 25, I’ve set out on a virtual escape to the country to see if this year’s entry can soothe this city slicker’s troubled soul.
Planting the Seeds
As I load into the town of Riverbend Springs, I’m immediately impressed by the graphical presentation of Farming Simulator 25. Perhaps this is damning with faint praise, but this genre can so often be undone by low budgets or drab art direction.
Farming Simulator has been something of a quiet juggernaut across its previous entries and it has clearly afforded the developers with a chance to flesh out their world with well-rendered environments, a clean UI and an opening cutscene that seems far better than it needs to be.
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I choose the guided tour option so I can get a sense of how this game is meant to work. I’m introduced to my grandpa Walter and this is where I’m losing a little bit of the realism the game is striving for. Walter stands stiff as a board as he delivers stilted voice lines that don’t sound dissimilar to a text-to-speech app. Still, he’s family, so I follow his every instruction.
I start off cultivating a field, driving my tractor back and forth to prep the soil for whatever I choose to grow. While I do this I’m reminded of Lawn Mowing Simulator, another title that I thought would whisk me away into a more peaceful existence. But as I got deeper into that game, and realised I had real-world gardening to take care of, the joys of virtual lawn maintenance wore thin fast. Hopefully, I wasn’t headed down the same path.
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The number of terms I don’t understand is growing more and more overwhelming. I don’t know liming from rolling and while I’m sure everything will map on to some sort of gaming mechanic, it’s still a lot to take in.
After planting my seeds, harvesting some crops and transporting them for sale, Grandpa Walter clearly doesn’t want to hold my hand anymore and lets me loose to do whatever I want. The problem is I don’t know why I’d want to do any of this yet.
I’m already feeling a sense of being inundated and all of this is leaving me questioning if Farming Simulator 25 is going to be the relaxing experience I was seeking?
Growing Frustration
It’s worth adding that by this stage, I’ve tried keyboard and mouse controls and a controller and had no real preference. There’s a lot of actions to memorise, but once you have everything down, both options work great in Farming Simulator 25.
After some aimless wandering, I return to Walter for some direction on what to do next. He tells me about a job offer to harvest another farm’s field and asks me if I have the right equipment to do the job. With a completely unearned confidence, I assure him I do and set off on my journey.
What follows is an extremely sluggish journey in my harvester across the entire map of Riverbend Springs, repeatedly causing traffic jams as cars struggle to get around me. After 15 real-world minutes simply driving to this field, it’s time to get harvesting.
It doesn’t take many laps driving back and forth through this field to realise just how massive it is, and that my harvester is nearing capacity with a tiny fraction of the task complete. Once I reach the limit, I head off to dump my load, another fifteen minute drive that I spend constantly thinking… ‘I must be doing this wrong.’
Having wasted close to an hour and accomplishing 15% of the job, I throw my hands up in the air and give up. I may just not be cut out for farming life.
Feeling Bogged Down
Clearly I made mistakes and Farming Simulator 2025 and I have gotten off on the wrong foot. I elect to start fresh with an entirely new save.
This time, we venture to the town of Zielonka, a more Central European flavour of the country life, and try out a new approach of just sticking with what I’m comfortable with.
I get back to cultivating and harvesting my own fields, driving back and forth repeatedly. Farming Simulator is filled with recognisably branded vehicles and tools, which lend a lot to the realism of the experience.
The sound design in Farming Simulator 2025 is serviceable, but the grinding machinery is not necessarily what I’m looking for, so I throw on a podcast on while I work. I’m beginning to find a bit of zen in this game.
But, I’m not productive enough. I’m sitting on piles of wheat and their prices are at an annual low. I start looking to other areas to expand and try to educate myself on animal husbandry.
Next thing you know, I’m the owner of twenty chickens and that sense of anxiety starts creeping back in. I eventually figure out how to feed and take care of them and sure enough, they start producing eggs. An egg-cellent development! Only issue is these eggs magically appear on a pallet outside the chicken coop and I have no way to lift them.
I spend half my savings on a forklift because I’m sure it will come in handy in the long run. As I drive my fancy new forklift to the chicken coop, it begins to snow. A beautiful sight, but I am finding it harder to control my vehicle. A couple of revs of the engine and the forklift is bogged. The game does have an option to reset your vehicle, which gets it out of trouble, but sends it back to the store. After I retrieve my forklift and head back to my precious supply of eggs, I once again become bogged in my own driveway.
My zen has dissipated. Look, clearly Farming Simulator 25 isn’t the problem, but I am. I keep making the wrong calls. It looks as though this game and I just aren’t going to click.
Cultivating Enthusiasm
I begin my third save game in Farming Simulator 25, returning to Riverbend Springs in the hopes that it’s maybe more beginner-friendly. I clearly need all the help I can get.
This time I’m approaching the game with a clearer sense of what I have to accomplish: whatever the hell I feel like.
I’m not going to be bound by economics or ticking timelines. I’m just going to focus on doing tasks until I understand them properly. I’ll lease every piece of equipment instead of blowing my life savings on experiments. And while I have been browsing through YouTube tutorials and scanning wikis, I start to use the game’s in-game help guide, which proves to be a wonderful resource.
I finally start to understand that Farming Simulator 25 offers an enormous amount of activities to do, but also puts the player under no pressure to do any of them. That cosy feeling I was looking for finally starts to settle in.
I harvest my fields before cultivating them and re-planting crops. I raise my cows to good health and add in another chicken coop with greater success this time. Building a doghouse adds a dog to my farm who does nothing but offer up companionship and it’s the perfect addition to my growing business.
Sometimes when tasks become repetitive, I hire workers to do my jobs for me while I set out to find something more interesting. I take on contracts for people in the town and in doing so, find myself developing a sense of place in Riverbend Springs where I no longer need the map because I know my way around town. This is beginning to feel like home.
I think Farming Simulator 25 and I are finally on the same page.
A Successful Harvest
Once I settled into a groove, the gameplay loop of Farming Simulator 25 has become quite addictive. I am now the owner of a self-sufficient farming enterprise with limitless opportunities to expand.
There’s such an enormous amount of things and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what can be accomplished. While I may be in the beginning of my farming career, I’m in no rush to push forward and grow. The journey is proving to be much more satisfying than the destination.
I guess that’s where I finally came to find my appreciation for what the Farming Simulator series offers. While I spent close to six hours achieving nothing and getting frustrated in aborted game saves, I was coming to it with the yuppie mindset I’d been hoping to shake off. A sense that I wasn’t being productive enough, that I’m not doing the right things and making enough money.
That’s not the point of Farming Simulator 25. It offers a quiet, reflective escape from the pressures of daily life and gives you the tools to grow at your own pace.
I found that I’d load up the game and just want to tick off a couple of quick jobs, only to lose hours to its meditative flow.
Veterans of the series will have likely read this and rolled their eyes at my various struggles, and that’s fair enough. You’ve already cracked the code, figured out the pleasures of this series and perhaps this article isn’t for you. But for other newbies like myself to this series, I’d suggest giving Farming Simulator 25 a go. And I mean really devoting the time to tap into its specific wavelength.
You just might discover that enthusiastic farmhand that’s always been there in your heart.
Farming Simulator 25 releases November 12 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC and Mac.
Quest Daily was provided early access to Farming Simulator 25 for the purpose of this article.
