Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition Review

• Platforms: Nintendo Switch
• Developer:  Chibig
• Publisher: Chibig
• Release Date: April 15th, 2021

After a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2020, Chibig’s Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition has landed on the Nintendo Switch. Promising a relaxing farming adventure with unique content only for the Nintendo Switch, Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition certainly delivers at times, however, frustrating quest design and an overall lack of polish sour the experience more often than not.

In Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition you take on the role of Arco, the sole occupant of a tiny little planet known as Deiland. A traveling astronaut named Mûn takes an interest in both Arco and the small planet, and you work together to learn more about Deiland. Apart from Mûn, you’ll also be visited by a variety of other space travelers who will offer up quests and also serve as traders and merchants. For the most part these quests are simple “collect x amount of this item” style quests, and the characters will drop in and check on the status of their tasks periodically throughout your playthrough.

In order to complete these quests, you’ll need to brush up on your farming skills and grow various crops, take out monsters who try and invade your land, and scavenge for items to trade with visitors of your planet. To do this, Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition combines several different genres of games, from farming sim, adventure, and a little RPG, however none of the mechanics from any of these genres are used in a significant way. The farming specifically is pretty barebones, as there’s no soil to till or watering to be done. Once you plant a seed you don’t need to pay any attention to the crop until it’s fully grown and ready to harvest. The combat of the game feels really out of place and clumsy, especially when casting magic spells where the game’s camera does an odd jump cut to the enemy every time it is hit by a spell.

The planet of Deiland is indeed pocket-sized, and you can pretty much explore every nook and cranny in less than a minute in a similar way to how Mario traverses small planets in Super Mario Galaxy. Apart from your house, a small body of water, and your crop fields, the entire planet is covered in mining and forestry resources for you to collect. An interesting mechanic in the game, which is a good tip before starting the game, is that your forestry resources do not replenish automatically and it is up to you to replenish the land as you chop away at the trees and bushes of the planet. If you don’t stay on top of planting acorns as you wipe out a forest, you’ll soon be left with no resources to collect precious lumber. The nice part is that it allows you to layout your planet to your liking, planting trees and bushes wherever you see fit to make Deiland feel like your own.

Both visually and audibly the game is pretty much what you’d expect from a small Indie title, but the game’s standout feature is easily the redesigned character art, which was a stretch goal that was achieved during the Kickstarter campaign. The new character art is absolutely stunning, and it made meeting each new character a highlight of the experience.

The most frustrating thing about Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition can be the quest design, which can really weigh down your progression and make the game feel like a slog. For example, you will eventually come across a quest where you must bring a certain number of materials to an NPC, which can be obtained by killing a specific monster. Monsters aren’t exactly a plentiful commodity in the game, maybe two or three spawning on your planet every hour or so of your playtime, and there’s no guarantee you’ll encounter the enemy you need. On the flipside, some quests can be just too easy and a little non-sensical. At one point an NPC was looking for corn, which he himself sold in his shop, so I was able to immediately buy it from him to fulfill his quest requirements.

Overall Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition shows moments of promise with its blend of farming sim, adventure, and RPG elements, however the lack of polish and frustrating quest design really hamper the experience. There is definitely some charm in the character art and overall story of the game, and if you’re a parent or someone looking for a farming sim or light adventure game on your Switch that won’t be too overwhelming, Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition may just be the game you’re looking for.

A Nintendo Switch review code for Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition was provided by Chibig