Back when I played the Fae Farm base game, I was incredibly disappointed by the bland and broken experience, so I shouldn’t be shocked the Coasts of Croakia DLC is more of the same. It’s a soulless collect-a-thon with no personality or point.
After acquiring the DLC, which is $10 by the way if you don’t own the Switch version that gets it for free, the Archi-Pal-Igo Park opens up. It’s a rather small area accessed by going through Grenu the frog’s mouth in Stay-A-While Bay. You can go around to grab the new recipes for swamp, pond, and frog-themed furniture, wallpapers, and rugs, get the ability to turn critters into pets, can make Trinkets for them to equip for buffs, and will see an array of different critters, some rare.
And… that’s it.
I didn’t finish the critter section of my Almanac in Fae Farm, because I was so disappointed in the endless array of palette swaps, and the Buddy Binder in the Coasts of Croakia DLC is basically that again. Because of course even if you caught critters before, it doesn’t count. Now you need to find them all again while you have the Critter Conch, making sure you upgraded it enough so you can speak the right “language,” and collect them all again. And why? So you can see a one to two sentence description of it, possibly name it or assign it a Trinket so you get a buff, and have it trail behind you. Different versions of critters don’t have any special bonuses or traits. They’re all the palette swaps again.
Even talking to one of these pets via the power of said Critter Conch is as lifeless and disappointing as the conversations with other Fae Farm NPCs. This is because there’s tons of reused text. I started seeing the same script after catching my first four, and it killed my motivation to ever try to talk to any of them.
Speaking of a lack of motivation, the buffs afforded by the Trinkets lose all value when you realize how far you’ll need to be to get and make them. In my opinion, the Superior Diamond Trinket is the most valuable. It means fewer trips into mines are necessary, since it increases Mining Efficiency and Power by three each, while also offering a 15% boost to Energy and Mana. Except… it requires diamonds. Those are one of the last types of gem you’ll find in Fae Farm, as they’re found around floor 18 in Scorched Caverns. That’s an endgame dungeon, and you likely have the orichalcum or gold pickaxe by that point that… makes that perk redundant.
I know that Fae Farm is only three months old, but for the Coasts of Croakia DLC to have no content for endgame or postgame players, the same lifeless NPCs, and a tedious checklist that sends you collecting critters you’ve seen before feels unacceptable to me. While the main game’s dungeons ended up getting tedious and uninspired, it feels like we should have at the very least gotten something more substantial like that instead of a new checklist with few benefits. I didn’t think I could be more disappointed with Fae Farm after playing the base game, but I’m coming away feeling like Coasts of Croakia proves it could somehow get worse.
Fae Farm and its Coasts of Croakia DLC are available for the Nintendo Switch and PC.
