As far as the devs of Lightyear Frontier are willing to say so far, you’re largely alone on this planet aside from a merchant who visits regularly to trade, though I’m told there are a few distant contacts elsewhere in the solar system that can be communicated with if not necessarily seen. If you’re coming at Lightyear Frontier from the more social farming sims like Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon, what jumps out the most aside from the mech bits are the lack of other characters to interact with. Personally, I’m hoping for a little of both. But given how little of Lightyear Frontier I was able to see, it’s entirely possible this resolves itself with time – either by leaning into increasingly absurd upgrades for these farming guns, or by finding more ways to drive the themes home. It’s a good kind of ridiculous, but Lightyear Frontier seems blissfully unaware of its own silliness, resulting in a strange thematic dissonance at the earliest stage of interstellar farming. Its vacuum arm slurping up sheaves of wheat, or blasting my plant beds with a seed cannon are fundamentally ridiculous things. But in my limited demo the mech felt less like a repurposed gundam and more like a goofy household appliance. There's a thematic purpose here, in that you're using a tool typically depicted in popular media as a war machine with war weapons as a tool to build a peaceful existence. One thing that didn’t quite click for me (but may still) is the inherent silliness of being in a mech at all. You can just spray ‘em all at once, easypeasy.

The mech is large and slow moving, but what it lacks in speed it makes up for in really big, efficient farming guns that eliminate the typical early-game farming sim tedium of hauling a can of water up to each square, watering, then moving to the next. The primary distinction is that instead of playing as a little dude in overalls, you’re piloting a repurposed mech to do all your farming chores. It’s a familiar loop for farming sim fans of all stripes: collect resources, use resources to build things that help you get more resources, repeat.

I got a feel for basic farming, and was able to build some basic structures like a plant bed and a silo, plant seeds, water them, and harvest. For my hands-on preview, I was able to explore a small portion of Lightyear Frontier’s first area.

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