As soon as I saw its first trailer, I decided to love Lightyear Frontier, the alien planet casual mechanical farm game. After playing the demo and speaking with Frame Break’s CEO Joakim Kopriva Hedström at this week’s Steam Next Fest, I haven’t changed my mind. But it turns out this isn’t the week-long farm simulation obsession I was expecting. Instead, I found a well-oiled and approachable open-world to-do list that would appeal to business simulator gamers as much as it does to my usual farming friends.
Lightyear Frontier begins with me crash-landing on a planet and picking up my giant mechanical suit with a robot assistant in my ear guiding me. It’s immediately fun to ride around in my giant red machine; I turn and cut down trees with my pointed saw arm and use my gatling gun-looking sprout cannon to shoot new saplings directly into the ground. The bright primary color setting gives me childhood playset vibes (in a good way), and the cheerful synth and acoustic guitar music had me humming along within a minute.
Once I get to know my controllable multi-purpose tool, I set up a base of operations for myself with a tent, campfire, storage chest and planting areas. As nice as it sounds, this is not a survival game. I don’t have to worry about feeding myself, I just feed the local wildlife.
Lightyear Frontier calls itself a “peaceful open-world farming adventure”; This means I craft devices to turn resources into materials, upgrade my machine’s harvesting abilities, and explore the map (not hand-designed, not created) to bring biomes to life. He was possessed by mysterious purple goo.
No wasted space
It was this environmentalism angle that initially attracted me to the Lightyear Frontier. As much as I love farming sims and crafting games, they both encourage domination. In Stardew Valley, I clear an entire landscape of trees and replace them with expensive fruit crops, while crafting games challenge me to build vast wooden monuments to industry and ego.
While these games are uplifting, Hedström told me that Frame Break wanted a different kind of positive message in the Lightyear Frontier that didn’t encourage exploitation. “You want to achieve this harmony with nature,” he says. “You find this amazing new planet and you don’t want to destroy it; you want to be a part of it.”
One of my first goals is to find the nearby Pine Heights area, a barren and craggy biome devoid of life, and restore it by filling my machine’s water tank and using an irrigation hose handle to blast patches of purple goo on the ground. I have to admit, the main thing that brought job simulations to my mind was probably the power washing sludge with percent completion load.
You find this amazing new planet and you don’t want to destroy it; You want to be a part of it.
After locating all the offending globules and achieving 100% recovery, grass grows and new tree leaves sprout in the area that was previously barren. Now I can mine aluminum and red crystals that I can mine and use in new construction. Animal life also returns – an awe-inspiring “mouse-callion” with fleshy proboscis noses and bipedal legs – waiting for me to make food to offer them. I pass by some wild “poppies” (apparently alien red sprouts) that I sucked up with my vacuum harvester attachment and brought back to plant in my garden plots.
Hedström says the feedback loop doesn’t always happen so naturally. The Lightyear Frontier was more punishing early in development; a system he describes as “pay attention to nature, or bad things will happen”, with eco points and other measures aimed at showing players their effects. This turned out to be much more stressful for players than fun. Instead, Lightyear Frontier focuses on positive feedback, “if you do good things, good things will happen to you.”
Unlike many life simulation farming games, trees do not regrow on their own; This is part of the principle of ‘do good for your own sake’. “Instead of having to progress further, players naturally start planting these groves of nearby trees,” explains Hedström.
I can already feel this in the demo when I start arming myself with the saw from inside the grove of trees where I’m camped near the meadow. When I notice them becoming scarce, I pull out my sprout ball and throw a few new seeds into the ground nearby. That’s much quicker gratification than any real reforestation project could provide, but as you’ve probably gathered from the mechanics, Lightyear Frontier isn’t set on being realistic.
When it comes to designing my farm, the construction system doesn’t go very deep. It uses prefabricated structures such as barns and farmhouses to play, not individual building blocks. Instead, I unlock decor and other crafting machines to customize the exterior of my interplanetary farm. I can’t bring animals back to live on my farm yet, but Hedström confirms that this is on the roadmap for early access.
Lightyear Frontier’s store page teases some more alien biomes to restore later in the game, as well as a story where you’ll “unravel clues spread across the planet’s various environments and uncover lost knowledge.” The mysterious metal door that glowed when I finished restoring Pine Heights alludes to this story.
Lightyear Frontier strikes me as a game that puts a light touch on many of the systems that other farming, crafting or survival games delve into. Construction is quite simple as described; There’s a simple “economy” screen that shows possible price changes on individual resources I can sell, occasional weather and hazards, and farming before seasons pass. It’s all very low pressure, which leads me to believe this would be an ideal Game Pass game, especially when it features four-player co-op at launch.
Lightyear Frontier demo available now on Steam As part of Next Fest until February 12. It will be available in early access on March 19 and will also be included in Game Pass.