A Night on the Farm (Nintendo Switch) Review

The silent, faceless, and all-around characterless hero that serves as your… "you," runs their car into a fence outside of a farm, and as the pitch-black darkness renders walking into the unknown a bad choice, he/she approaches the nearby, dimly lit structures. Sadly (and creepingly enough) there's nobody home, and you must then follow a breadcrumb trail of messages that were left behind, piece the events of the story together, and, if possible, get far away from the place.

To give any more info about what's going on here will be to spoil it, as A Night on the Farm is first and foremost a story-centric adventure. Yes, players will find pieces of text which will lead them to the next step in line, like a hidden key, or a password for a terminal, but this won't really give you the opportunity to flex your puzzle-solving muscles. A Night at the Farm revolves around finding what happened and everyone is missing, and soaking on its very unnerving atmosphere.

To be a little less cryptic, this is about a small community of people who are researching something… very strange, with one of the characters realising its importance, and leaving messages that tries to explain that. The player character will have to make certain choices that will affect the finale, with about five experienced from the one writing this, simply because it's easy to reload the last auto-save and make different choices. It's not that the endings are something special to be honest. Once you've seen one, you've seen it all. The story is a standard sci-fi tale as well (with a touch of the paranormal). Good, but nothing great.

By all means, A Night on the Farm's best quality is its atmosphere. There's nothing that can kill you here, and there's only a sole instance which could be considered a jump scare (and a very mild one), yet you always feel as if something dangerous is hiding in the shadows, with the dark PS1 visuals, and the minimal use of sound adding to the creepy feeling. Even the annoyingly narrow field of vision seems to exist solely for the intention of making one uncomfortable. Word of notice: playing on handheld mode makes everything thrice as dark, so try this out only after turning off every light and closing every window in your room.