You’ll Love Kitaria Fables When You’re Into Cats And Farming
Would you like to become a hero who saves the world by defeating monsters? Or would you prefer to be a farmer who enjoys growing plants and crops in front of your house? Or is it both you’re looking for?
| THE GOOD | THE BAD |
|---|---|
| Beautifully designed feel-good world | Lots of grinding and backtracking |
| Charming characters | Stereotypical story and characters |
| Very accessible | Fewer challenges in the endgame |
| Easy-to-learn but hard-to-master battle system | Some bugs |
| Great coop mode |
Fret not, allow me to introduce you to a game called Kitaria Fables. It’s is an action-adventure with elements of farming simulators made by Twin Hearts Games from Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Evidently, it is heavily inspired by the old but gold Harvest Moon and one of the most excellent modern farm sims, Stardew Valley. While most genre representatives are set in semi-realistic human worlds, Kitaria Fables purely plays in a fantasy realm full of humanoid animals like cats, rabbits, bears, etc., and a mix of fantasy creatures such as orcs. That’s the first breath of fresh air Kitaria Fables has to offer for me.
The story revolves around a world named Kitaria, which currently faces a tide of darkness called calamity. Its effect makes the stray monsters around the neighbourhood of Paw Village become aggressive and attack everyone. You will be playing Nyanza Von Whiskers, cat warrior slash aspiring farmer. While it starts as a grey-furred cat, you actually can change your character skins in-game, which is a nice touch.
Your higher-ups summon you to go to protect the Paw village from the aggressive monsters. Help the fellow villagers by finishing quests for them. The quests are solid but seldom go beyond the usual “kill x monsters” and “fetch object y.” While most of them follow the main plotline and tell decent stories, there is some tedium involved too. The developers rely on backtracking and griding a little too often, especially in the endgame. As you progress, you’ll find out soon enough that the world is endangered and that you must chase down several relics to stop the calamity.
However, as mentioned before, this isn’t only an action-adventure game. It is worth noting that Kitaria Fables has a farming mechanic where you can farm and grow plants, too; you will be given the tools as you progress, such as a hoe, a sickle, a watering pot, and then an axe for cutting trees. Depending on the seed type, it may require up to five days game-time until you harvest the crops. You can make money from selling those, but you can also keep them as an ingredient to craft other items.
Battles against monsters are being fought in a real-time system, similar to many action-adventures out there. It is pretty straightforward: you either attack or evade, cast a few spells, always eye your health bar, and that’s it. Regular enemies like blobs or even orks don’t pose much of a threat, but boss fights can be challenging. Your first weapon is a sword, but you can upgrade it or craft a bow if you prefer a marksman. It was my chosen playstyle as you can defeat enemies from a safe distance. Each weapon also has special moves like a “Rapid Thrust” for the swords and “Triple Shot” for bows. Not only that, in time you will be able to learn how to cast spells with a variety of elements such as earth, wind, fire and last but not least, water.
Bear in mind that this is not only a singleplayer game. You can also play co-op multiplayer. It won’t affect the whole story, but it makes the game more enjoyable to defeat monsters and farm together.
However, one of the early version cons of multiplayer is the inventory system. The save file will be synchronized as you can play both singleplayer and multiplayer in the same save file. If the second player holds a valuable item in the character’s inventory, you must put it in the chest box; otherwise, if you play the multiplayer, the items will remain in the second player inventory. Valuable items can remain unreachable if you play solo again. Unless the developers don’t fix this significant issue, I recommend making a different save file exclusive for singleplayer to avoid that.
I recommend Kitaria Fables if you’re into relaxing adventure RPG games with cute animal characters and farming simulation mechanics. I found no issues with the control mechanics as well. It has a few shortcomings in gameplay variety and requires a considerable load of griding, which is not necessarily bad. However, the game world looks terrific and cozy and made me want to return to Kitaria again and again.
Kitaria Fables is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox consoles. This review is based on the Steam version we acquired for this review.
