Roots of Pacha is a game CGMagazine first set eyes on at Summer Game Fest in 2022. Seemingly inspired by games like Stardew Valley, the game is a life and farming simulator that sees your village take shape and evolve as time goes on. Originally released in April 2023 on Steam, Roots of Pacha will be launching on Nintendo Switch on November 28th, and we jumped in head first ahead of the release to see how it stacks up.
In Roots of Pacha, you are placed in an early-world settlement as you build relationships, learn skills like farming and gathering, and slowly help your village build up the world around you. The basics of the game are told through the storytelling of your elders, where you learn that you are children of Pacha and you must work together to build your village and evolve how you and your people live.
As a villager, you will spend your days gathering new seeds and herbs, cooking, fishing, attuning (taming) animals, farming, exploring, uncovering caves and building relationships with your fellow villagers as friends or as romance options. You can also build and decorate your home, and Roots of Pacha takes this a step further than standard simulators. You’re able to create a sense of individuality by painting your decor pixel by pixel to suit your style, and it can be incredibly rewarding seeing it all come together.
“Roots of Pacha is a refreshing take on the farming/life sim genre, with great ideas and features.”
Make no mistake, though, Stardew Valley is definitely a heavy influence for Roots of Pacha in both gameplay and art style. That doesn’t mean this is a simple copy and paste of the popular farming simulator since there is enough here to make Roots of Pacha something special. One such aspect is the ability to develop ideas with your fellow villages to create new tools and develop your village. This starts with things like meat smokers and moves on to fermenters to make mead and wine, new ways to pickle foods, and even cheese-making.
As your gameplay progresses, you see your village evolve as well, with villages building bridges, lookout areas, battle training areas and more. You also unlock new areas as you move through the game, including the beach, forest, jungle and savannah. Each section brings new things into the game such as seeds, pets, or animals to produce food or crafting products.
For example, Ostriches produce feathers and eggs, Boars produce fur, and the Ibex produces milk, whereas bunnies, wolves and mammoths can be pets. You can also mount most of the larger animals to move around between areas quickly, as there are no fast travel options outside of the caves.
“Make no mistake, though, Stardew Valley is definitely a heavy influence for Roots of Pacha in both gameplay and art style.”
Because the game has already launched on Steam, we are here to talk about the new Nintendo Switch port that brings the game to a whole new audience. Truthfully, Roots of Pacha is the kind of game that is meant for the Nintendo Switch. It’s perfect for travelling, but it is still enough of a time sink that you’ll want to be able to sit back on the couch and play on the big screen as well.
In terms of performance, a fellow writer and I saw some minor issues with stuttering and another glitch that repeatedly made the animal-attuning ability fail. A few moments later, the game crashed completely, causing them to lose a day, but everything was working normally on start-up. These were small, isolated issues, but they could still be something you want to stay aware of.
Outside the game’s platform, Roots of Pacha has so much content to discover. After quite a bit of playtime, I found myself still finding more and more to do. Be aware that it is definitely a repetitive day-in-day-out cycle, but if that is your kind of game, much like Stardew Valley or Fae Farm, you will love Roots of Pacha and have no shortage of content to keep you busy.
With a unique spin on the simulation genre, Roots of Pacha’s cute art style, gameplay loop, and creative ideas make for an excellent, cozy game with no shortage of content to keep you playing for hours on end.
