This is the second farm related game I've played in as many days, the other being Farmville 2, that was a very silly, very short game. Farmyard Chronicles is neither.

The basic premise is simple, Lace and Garvin are two people (given their relationship dynamic I'm thinking siblings) who work at a farm on the grounds of a castle owned and inhabited by a ponder of wizards. One day for reasons that are not explained the wizards all hightail it out of Dodge for an unspecified amount of time and leave the running of the farm to Lace and her idiot brother friend. No sooner have they gone than Garvin tries to cast a spell on Lace to see if he can teleport her across the room, please note he waits until all the wizards have left to do this because he know it's a RDI, (Really Dumb Idea). Lace sensibly is having none of that so to calm her he practices on a sheep in the barn first. He does indeed manage to teleport the sheep across the barn, but then it starts popping all over the place like a startled prairie dog and then this ability spreads to all the other animals like some form of airborne pathogen and before you know it all the animals are gone, teleported away to diverse locations around the farm, castle and neighbouring regions. Now it's up to you, and by 'you' I mean Lace, to go out there and get them back before all the wizards return to find the barn door open and the horse has bolted, the chickens have flown the coop, the cattle have stampeded, the dogs have been let out, the cats have slunk off and the sheep have gotten lost.


This cow is pasture prime. I'll have to ruminate on the problem.

Each animal requires a different strategy for capture. The first animal you're introduced to is the cow, which has to be herded into its pen. This is achieved by pussyfooting around the animal until you are on the opposite side from where you want it to go and then giving it a none-too-gentle push. Once it is inside the pen it will stay and not wander out again and once you have the first three back where they belong Garvin pops up and installs a crystal teleport field so if they try to wander out they just get teleported back in. These crystals show up in other areas of the game and wherever you see them you can use them to transport the animals back to the barn. If you can score a goal by getting them to the space between them, that is. The chickens however don't need the aid of teleportation, you just give them a swift kick in passing and they'll fly back home, with their feathers ruffled. PETA would seriously hate this game. The dog will follow you around for a while if you give it a snack, it must be a Labrador, and will follow you just about anywhere if you give it a shiny collar, sorry it must have some magpie in with those canine genes. The cat will run if you've got the dog with you because that's what cats do apparently. Most cats would have turned the dog's nose into mincemeat and taught it to mind it's doggy manners, but this is obviously a scaredy cat. Still chasing cats is easier than herding them. The sheep and horses however are more pig-headed and fight back; the former by head-butting you and the latter with a swift and vicious kick. Though that later turns out to be an aid in solving some of the more location challenged puzzles; albeit a painful sounding one.

Scattered throughout the game are runeshards, objects of power that the wizards who run this place obviously have little use for since you find them discarded in pots and cupboards, buckets and baskets, in mines and down wells. These shards can be fashioned onto useful items once you have collected enough of them, and each item will aid in some way in getting the animals back home where they belong. Be warned though, attempting to bell the cat before you have the necessary accessories is a wild goose chase. Collecting them all is not necessary as in order to create all the animal catching items you need you only require 320 and there are more than that in the game but it does give you a nice feeling of accomplishment. Another thing that does is getting a complete set of returned animals. That gets you that animal's award and returning all 136 animals (seriously that barn is a TARDIS, no way do 136 animals fit in 4 small pens with 3 in the paddock) contributes to one of the multiple endings available in the game, the one aptly named 'completionist' .


Pay attention to the advice, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Information is gleaned from books on bookshelves and on occasion from Garvin, though his contributions are generally either parroting back what you've already learned from a book, or by trial and error.

It really gets my goat that it was the idiot boy who created the entire problem in the first place by horsing around and putting the cat amongst the pigeons. Then it was Lace that had to be saddled with the responsibility to fix it by traipsing all over the place herding animals, punting animals, getting punted by animals, bribing animals and scaring animals to get them to do what you want whilst Mickey Mouse hangs out in the barn trying to make broom's walk and carry water and basically chilling out somewhere warm and comfortable surrounded by creature comforts waiting for Lace to come back bruised and battered with enough runeshards for him to make the next item. Which means he's at best an alchemist, not a wizard, at the very least he could have run interference with those mulish sheep.

You don't get access to the menu until half way through the game, or more precisely until you have fashioned the first three runeshard items, but even when you do it's not a menu in the traditional sense, just an ability to swap your active item. Which unfortunately means you have to F12 out which always seems a little problematic to me, but it works in its fashion. Saving is only via specialised objects, which look like equilateral crosses, the only problem being the developer has used the same shape to designate door locks as well so there can be a little confusion when you think you've found somewhere you can save only to find it opened a door instead.

I'm not a big fan of restrictive saving, I can understand when you don't want someone to be able to save half way through a puzzle but that can be worked around in RM2K by simply making that particular map save restricted. Having the entire game as such just means I have to trot back from wherever I was to the barn in order to be able to save.

That is another slight failing with the game, due to the fact that each of the animals needs a different strategy, well until you get the ultimate power, there is quite a bit of backtracking as you are required to visit every area multiple times in order to use whatever your new skill or item is on the animals that remain. Not to mention the large amount of time you have to spend literally waiting for the animal you need to change places with to appear in exactly the right place to allow the teleportation beam to transfer you.

However the game does shine in the area of its puzzles. The developer definitely has something to crow about here. They are inventive and require you to really think your way through them to find the best way to track down and recapture all those wandering animals. You have to be creative in your application of available skills and there are times when making sure you are in the right place at the right time (generally in the vicinity of a horse's rear end) is vital to completing a puzzle and getting one more beast back home. Luckily that initial burst of teleportation that sent them to the most unlikely and inaccessible locations doesn't repeat itself so when you have worked your way through a strategy to get you where you need to be to send the animal in question home they don't pull a disappearing act on you.

There are two reflex based minigames, the mine cart jump and dodge the sheep stampede, that require some fast finger work to get through. The sheep are less forgiving than the mine carts as each collision will send you staggering back, but the mine carts do on occasion present you with an obstacle configuration you just have to barrel through as you can't jump over, and too many of those result in a restart. The only qualm I have with these minigames is that if you don't have the reflexes to beat them there is no skip option. That means as you do need the items you can only get once passing these obstacles you cannot continue with the game as doors will remain locked and additional magical items cannot be created. It's not designed to take into account the different skill levels of the possible players. To be blunt given the engine in which it is made it is more likely on first glance at the screenshots to appeal to the older players who have nostalgic feelings but slower reflexes than the younger ones who are looking for smoother graphics but have faster fingers. It would be an easy fix to have a choice kick in after say 5 failed attempts to allow you to skip and proceed. If the developer still wants to reward those that managed to succeed at these reflex games but not penalise to the point of walking away from the game those that simply can't then there can be a line in the final ending(s) that says, you got all the animals, but you skipped the sheep stampede so you only get a try-hard award. Or something of that nature.


Don't have a cow man - I've already caught them all.

All in all Farmyard Chronicle was a fun game and I spent quite a bit of time stepping my way through the combinations of teleport, body swap and being punted across a space by a belligerent horse like a pony piñata in order to solve some of the trickier puzzles. Yes the game has a few flaws and still needs polish, but I think some of the issues I had are simply a result of the type of game it is, repetition and thumb twiddling is built into the gameplay whether I found it dry or not, and in the end the fun factor was high enough to outweigh the deficits. Farmyard Chronicles is not easy, it can be frustrating at times, but that frustration does turn into a sense of achievement when you do manage to finally solve that tricky puzzle.

I would also really like to thank flapbat for making a game that allowed my animal puns and idioms free rein...yeah, that was another one.