Princess Farmer: when it rains, a grumpy block shows up

The sharpest complaint of the bunch has nothing to do with farming — it is aimed at the company that ships the game.

A farm girl, a magic tree and one grumpy block

There is a negative review on Steam, where the game is sold, logged with zero hours played — and the complaint is not about any session at all. It concerns access keys that the publisher, Whitethorn Games, had allegedly promised in a bundle campaign and then sat on for more than 240 days, in January 2024, without a word of explanation. It is the harshest note of the bunch, and it says nothing about the game: it talks about who distributes it.

Princess Farmer opens on an ordinary farm girl who wakes up under the Gaia Tree and comes away with the power to pull whole rows of vegetables out of the ground with her bare hands, popping obstacles as she goes. The story unfolds in episodes, in the mold of a magical-girl cartoon, each one running between twenty minutes and an hour — it depends on the style you pick, on how nimble you are, and on how much dialogue you decide to skip. Conversation choices shape the heroine's ties with Mother Gaia, with Garlic, with Rowan the shopkeeper and with the robot BunBot, and every friendship pays out a gift.

The puzzle trades the plain swap for a different logic: you gather at most five vegetables in hand to release the combination, and that ceiling shapes every stage. There are three ways to play — Action Bunny, Puzzle Bunny, or the middle ground between them — and some stages pit the player against a rival. When the rain comes, the calm goes: that is the cue for the Grumpy Block to turn up and get in the way of the harvest.

The feed that changed the subject

March 2023 brought the game's last content addition: an update for World Frog Day, with a new costume for the heroine and a batch of dyes in Rowan's shop, alongside a navigation fix for one of the nodes in episode 8. After that, the posts on the Princess Farmer page start talking about a different project: in August of that same year, the studio announced the Early Access launch of Elemental Survivors, an auto-attack survival game that nods to old-school RPGs — a genre a long way from the magic farm. Anyone going back to that page in search of a new episode finds silence: the attention has moved to the other side of the studio's catalogue.

Almost a thumbs-down, then a change of heart

One player came close to writing a negative review: the whole thing was too pink for their taste. They finished the game on May 8, 2026. A little over five hours after starting, they changed their mind and recommended it, granting that other games in the same vein do better what this one does.

Players who arrive comparing it with the handhelds of their childhood approve as well: a write-up from September 2026 invokes the Nintendo DS as praise, not as a dig, and singles out characters who are easy to warm to, dialogue worth reading and the soundtrack — the closing song above all. Once the story wraps up, the game's quick mode stretches the experience further, especially with a second person playing alongside over Remote Play Together.

A review posted a day earlier praises the five-vegetable hand limit as an interesting turn for the genre, recommends the episode 2 stage by name, and complains only about the missing visual warning in storm or rock stages — and about not being able to skip dialogue already seen when replaying a stage. One player past the twelve-hour mark, in September 2026, was chasing the last bunny dyes missing from the collection, squeezing in short runs in quick mode whenever a spare moment turned up.

Lovely to look at, easy to beat

The longest critique of the bunch dates from September 2024 and comes out of an hour of play: it grants the visuals and the world as real strengths and recommends the game to anyone who wants that, but calls the puzzle shallow — hammering buttons nonstop earns the top score in the timed stages, and it beats any attempt to build a combination calmly. Another one-hour review, from February 2025, boils the same thought down to a handful of words: pretty, weak as a puzzle.

A review in Chinese, also out of an hour, arrives at the same place from the mechanics side: it finds the drag-and-slot system more laborious than the straightforward pop of pieces in classic match-three games. On the French side, a five-hour review describes most stages as being on a clock or under real-time pressure, complains that choosing between the nimble style and the thoughtful one changes little in practice, and admits to dropping the game unfinished.

There are technical gripes too: a two-hour session reports controls that freeze and force a restart, progress lost when the app is closed in the middle of an area, and a plot the writer calls skippable. And there is the zero-hour review, the same one that opens this piece — people who never played vote too, and their vote goes against the company that ships it, not against the people who made it.

Who it suits, in the gap between episodes

Anyone after a puzzle that holds up against a bad plan will be frustrated early: the clock in the stages pushes toward improvisation, and mashing buttons without thinking scores as well as — or better than — assembling a combination with care, by the account of those who complained about it most. Anyone after a short story to play in loose episodes, complete with bunny dyes to collect and someone to play beside over Remote Play Together, gets exactly that with no padding — and comes away satisfied even after going in skeptical, as happened to the player who nearly left a bad score and turned around at the end.