Our Love Will Grow

I put time into Our Love Will Grow hoping to find a scrappy indie that understood what made the classic Harvest Moon formula tick. What I found instead is a game that clearly loves that formula from a distance, borrowing its skeleton without quite filling it out. That Neoseeker summary that calls it a game "that wants to be Harvest Moon" is the most honest two-line review you will find anywhere, and it is worth sitting with before you spend a cent. The core loop covers all the expected stations: plant and harvest crops, cook meals in your kitchen, raise barn animals, fish at rivers and ponds, and mine caves for minerals and crafting materials. Weekly parties are the social hub, and the relationship system has you talking to, dancing with, and gifting five romanceable characters in the hope of eventually marrying one. Gifting is the closest thing the game has to a resource-allocation puzzle. You craft food from your harvest and jewellery from cave minerals, then decide which gifts move the needle fastest with a specific character. It is a thin decision layer by any strategy standard, but for a casual session game it works passably. The worker-crab mechanic, where you assign crab helpers to farm tasks, is a small novelty that at least differentiates the game from a straight Stardew clone. The problems are structural. The RPGMaker engine puts a ceiling on animation fidelity, map complexity, and AI behaviour that the developer never managed to push through. Town feels sparse, character interactions are shallow, and the absence of Steam achievements is a minor but symbolic omission for a game whose engagement model depends on small milestone rewards keeping you logging back in. Steam reviews land at a mixed 69 percent positive across just over a hundred reviews, which signals a player base that finds something here but cannot fully recommend it. The sequel, Melting Hearts, dropped further to 46 percent positive, suggesting John Wizard struggled to address the core feedback. Who is this actually for? Players who have already burned through Stardew Valley, Story of Seasons, and Sun Haven and are now genuinely scraping the barrel for anything with a crop-rotation loop will find enough recognisable content to justify a few evenings. The price point is sub-five dollars, and a Farmer's Handbook DLC exists for anyone who wants guided tips rather than trial-and-error. The tutorial is thin, but the game is simple enough that this rarely matters. Controller support is present, which is a small quality-of-life win for couch play. There is no mod ecosystem to speak of, no post-launch content updates of significance, and no late-game complexity to reward investment. Manage those expectations clearly and the disappointment is proportionate.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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