So one of the games I got for reactivating GameFly was a copy of Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming. I imagined it to be some kind of sequel or updated version of the Harvest Moon game released last year, but I was met with quite the surprise.

The folks at Natsume decided to make a puzzle game based around their top franchise.

While I don’t suck at puzzle games, I’m not particularly stellar at them either. I read through about half of the tutorial until I had gotten the basics, and then played a bit of the story-mode. Y’know, it’s a pretty fun game, I must say. It has all of the necessary puzzle elements there. Combos for points and special units that create awesome effects, as well as game-types with multiple sorts of objectives and the easy possibility that you can screw yourself into a corner.

What makes the game a bit different is the fact that it relies on a little harvest sprite to actually pull these combos off. The general concept is you move vegetables into the best possible combination for the sprite to pull them up, after which he waters the surrounding ground and advances all vegetables to their next stage of growth. If there is no vegetable straight ahead, he will check his surroundings in a specific order to find more. The best way to get the most points in the quickest amount of time is not only to manipulate the vegetables he harvests, and all adjacent ones of the same type to generate a combo, but also placing vegetables in the surrounding area to be watered.

The game certainly fulfills the sort of fun any travel-based game would need to. Puzzle game addicts and fanatics will find the game enjoyable and even have fun competing with one another, especially since there are enough additional conditions to make things more and more interesting. Harvesting a golden vegetable will harvest all crops of that type regardless of their stage of growth. Huge vegetables are worth a lot of points, but you cannot move other crops past them as easily. So on and so forth.

I didn’t keep the game for too long as it doesn’t take long to figure out if a puzzle game is fun or not. I sent it back to GameFly, but I can think of quite a few folks I’d recommend the title to. While it’s no classic Harvest Moon game, it’s a pretty interesting use of the franchise to create a unique puzzle game.

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