Skystead Ranch Review

ToastieLabs’ Skystead Ranch follows the footsteps of many beloved life/farming sims, dropping us onto our very own island that’s looking a bit neglected: dry soil, junk aplenty, and no cute creatures in sight. The upside is that you have an enchanted crook that will help you transform this desolate ranch in the sky into a vibrant, magical place. Plus, a very talkative Field Guide is joining you on this journey, helping you get your bearings with helpful tips, occasional snarky commentary, and fourth-wall-breaking jokes.

In Skystead, you’re equipped with a wooden staff that can literally do everything you need. The first step to reviving your ranch is using the crook’s Terraforming mode, which will be accompanied by the Building and Utility modes as you progress through the tutorial. You’ll replace cracked soil with dirt and grass through Terraforming, set down habitats and storage via Building, and destroy junk or dig holes with the Utility option. That’s not even a complete list! You can also create small lakes, grow lush meadows, place cute farming decor, take photos, and more.

While I loved the variety of features this enchanted staff offers, I do have to note that carrying out those actions feels awkward, no matter what mode you’re using. Your base walking speed is already kind of slow, and it’s reduced further when you use the crook, so I constantly felt sluggish, as if my character was working with no energy. The animations are also very stiff and clunky, as you’re barely jutting the staff in and out for Terraforming and Utility actions, which just doesn’t feel great, nor does it match the whimsical vibe of the setting. On a positive note, the tool does give you a lot of flexibility with the size of placement tiles, allowing you to transform large patches of ground or just a small four-square space, but you’re not always able to be that precise; I quickly realised that my rotational options were pretty limited when building items, which could get frustrating for players that enjoy pinpointing the right angle and placement for their decor.

For me, the main appeal of Skystead was its focus on creature-collecting, and for a moment, it seemed like it would fill the Viva Piñata-shaped hole in my heart since much of the gameplay has you meeting requirements to attract and tame little Skylets, cute animal-like creatures of the region. For instance, to get a Buttontail to visit, you’ll need a certain percentage of grass in the area, or if you want Fauns, you’ll need a good amount of flowers.

Once you gain their curiosity, feeding them and placing decor that they enjoy will ensure that they stick around. I think this gameplay loop could benefit from tweaking the Skylets’ hunger metre, though, as it depletes almost immediately after you feed them. You usually need to grab multiple fruits or vegetables to satiate their hunger, so if you’re going back and forth between plants (or if you happen to lose the creature in the crowd of other animals), that hunger bar will drop you back to square one, which can get frustrating. Sometimes, a food item will have multiple charges, such as a Carrot, which allows you to feed a Skylet twice before disappearing, but even in those cases, it wouldn’t be enough. Perhaps the reason this gets so frustrating is because you don’t have an inventory, so whatever your character is holding at the time is all you have access to. A good solution to this would be to adjust the rate of depletion when it comes to food or allow the character to hold multiple items. I did eventually purchase a chest to build and was excited to get some actual storage (since it was labelled storage), but I was disappointed to find that it didn’t do anything when I tried to interact with it, so my inventory woes persisted.

I loved the Skylets’ widespread designs, and it felt like solving a puzzle when I’d figure out how to get new ones to visit my ranch, but they came with an annoyance that I couldn’t ignore for my entire playthrough: their constant sounds. In a Pokémon-like fashion, Skylets announce their name when you walk past, feed, or pet them, but since you’re doing all three of those things often, it gets to be too much very quickly, especially when you have a lot on your Skystead. Feeding a Grumble its favourite food four times in a row to raise its happiness became auditorily overstimulating, for instance, since I’d have to hear “Grumble!” over and over. I imagine this is a way to make sure a younger audience won’t forget the Skylets’ names since there are many different kinds of creatures. Additionally, I suspect it’s supposed to be cute, but the way the names are voiced evoked the opposite feeling for me. They are announced in a very breathy or sometimes screechy way that, unfortunately, doesn’t land nicely on my ears, so having to hear them multiple times in a matter of seconds soured the experience.

As mentioned, feeding your Skylets is one of the main ways to gain their trust and love, and gardening is the way you’ll get crops to support your ranch. Each day, a merchant sky-ship will arrive on your island’s dock, bringing a variety of plantable fruits and vegetables to purchase, using the gold you get from petting and feeding your animals. I loved the creativity of all the different plants, such as Biscuit shrubs (for the best doggos, of course) and colourful Nomshrooms; all the crops are cute and whimsical, which is perfect for this style of game. To grow them in your garden, simply dig a hole in Utility mode, plant the crop, wait for a bit (usually a couple of minutes or so), and then harvest.

The merchant ship is also where you’ll purchase upgrades for your crook, such as the ability to create patches of Long Grass or take photos of Skylets with a camera. In another tab, expansions for your island are available, such as opening up a mountain path, gaining access to your very own home, or fixing a fishing pier. Most of these worked as intended, allowing me to purchase them with gold, supply the needed materials to build them, and then use them, but some were a bit buggy. For instance, I unlocked the mines, which had plenty of space for me to grow crops, but when I would leave and return, those plants would disappear — pretty disappointing and a waste of gold. I was especially excited to enter my home (which I spent a lot of gold and materials on), only to find out that I couldn’t go inside; even worse, there was another upgrade at the merchant ship to expand the size of my home (that I had never entered).

Despite all that wasted gold, replenishing your funds is pleasantly easy as your Skylets are very generous, and while some things just simply didn’t work as intended (the house, storage, etc.), other features were very stable. The fishing mini-game was easy to grasp, as it employs a simple quick-time-event mechanic that only requires you to press one key, and if the animation for it were a bit faster, I would say it’s a perfect inclusion. My favourite thing to do was take photos of each of the Skylets, as the game ranked the quality of my snapshots, giving me star-based scores that seemed pretty accurate.

After spending multiple hours with Skystead Ranch, it’s clear that it has some rough edges that need smoothing. At the moment, it’s pretty underwhelming. Aside from the slow movement when you’re using the crook and buggy upgrades, there’s also a lot of repeated dialogue from your Field Guide narrator, who’ll pop in to give you the same info about plants or backstory about the crystal in the mines whenever you load a save. If you do need to save and close out the game, you need to allow yourself at least five minutes, as it freezes up, which would’ve made me think the whole thing crashed if not for the loading screen that notes, “It hasn’t crashed. Give it a minute.” When I put all these things together, Skystead Ranch feels unfinished. It does have the potential to be a great creature-collector farming sim, but it needs more time to get there.