Fields Of Mistria is a game with almost no friction. When you’re farming crops, your watering can is always full. When you’re catching fish, there’s no minigame but waiting for the bite. If you forage something but don’t have room in your backpack, it will sit where you left it. After not too long, you’ll unlock the lost and found system, meaning on the next Monday it will be whisked away into a big bucket conveniently near your farm for you to collect. 

And, I think because of this, my experience with Mistria is strange. It’s soothing to zone out for an hour and run through several days of wandering around the village and farming, mining, fishing, gifting bits and bobs to NPCs and so on, all working towards new ticks on the game’s absolutely massive checklist. And my checklist is getting full. The museum is overflowing; the mines are reopened down to the depths; my heart levels with the villagers are almost complete. I can’t deny that that feeling of pleasure, while insubstantial, has led to me sinking nearly 70 hours into the game in the last month or so, and I can’t deny enjoying it.

But I can say it has also been grating. During the low-tension cycle of the daily tasks, there’s plenty of time for thinking about both the (inherent?) political tensions of the farming simulator and the issues I have with this one in particular (more on both of those later). And yet I keep falling for just one more day. And even when I do decide I want to do something more thoughtful, give me a few hours and I’ll think, damn, breaking a few hundred more rocks with a pickaxe sounds really good right now, actually.