Game: Floating Farmer – Logic Puzzle
Genre: Puzzle, Logic, Casual
System: Steam, Windows, Mac
Developers | Publishers: Mens Sana Interactive
Controller Support: No
Price: US $1.99 | UK £1.69 | EU €1,59
Release Date: August 29th, 2021
Review code used, with many thanks to Mens Sana Interactive!
Floating Farmer is the latest of Mens Sana’s “Minimalist Farmer” puzzle series. This one, featuring 50 puzzles, works like Rubik’s Cube except it’s two-dimensional, not three-dimensional, and nowhere as difficult!
You might be terrible at Rubik’s Cube, as I am, but rest assured: Floating Farmer isn’t very hard once you get the hang of it.
Help Mom and Babies Get Home
The goal is to unscramble messed-up farmyards. In each level, you must reorganize a path that helps mommy and baby animals return to their shed.
This starts simply enough, with 3×3 grids. Gradually you move onto 4×4 and 5×5 grids. To reorganize the grid, you click on a tile and drag it. This causes all moveable tiles in that row or column to slide one space in your desired direction (up, down, left, or right). Some tiles—water and rock—aren’t moveable, so you’ll have to work around them. And take note: some path tiles are redundant; you don’t have to use them all.
Create a continuous path connecting mommy, babies, and shed. Then watch as mommy leads her children home, making cute animal noises along the way.
Randomly Sliding Tiles Doesn’t Work
Floating Farmer is a fairly relaxing game, though I had rare moments of frustration from being stuck on a few puzzles. One of those was Puzzle 15. I almost gave up playing then, when I suddenly hit on the solution by luck.
Up till then, I was simply moving pieces around without much thought. But as the grids grew bigger, I realized a little technique was needed. Once I understood how to move pieces where I wanted, the game became reasonably easy, especially the mid-game. 5×5 grids were a bit trickier, a good mental workout but not too taxing.
With a few puzzles, like Puzzles 41 and 50, I knew what the finished farmyard should look like, but I got stuck trying to execute it. Sometimes the solution is to step away for a breather and refresh your brain!
Cute, Relaxing, Hard to Fault
It’s a cute game, visually pleasing and cheery. The soundtrack is mellow and relaxing, clearly meant for a quiet afternoon on your couch with tea.
When you finish a puzzle, it’s satisfying to watch the animals trot home, and then see the “floating farm” descend from the sky. Oh, and one nice little detail you might not notice at first is how the baby animals always reorient themselves to face their mommy.
Being able to switch from isometric view to top-down view was incredibly helpful. Mouse controls are simple: there’s only one thing to do, which is drag tiles.
No major flaws in this simple but solid game. But a few very minor things came to mind. First, some players might really want a hint system. Second, some corner path tiles (like the duck screenshot above) were hard to distinguish. Third, I would have liked to see more visual variation, such as terrain in different seasons. But I do appreciate the current variety of tiles and use of 9 different farm animals from rabbits to llamas.
Conclusion
It’s not going to knock your socks off, but Floating Farmer is a decent game with cute visuals and manageable difficulty.
Finishing the 50 levels took me slightly under 5 hours. The difficulty is about easy to moderate for a puzzle game. I’d say the only prerequisite is to have a reasonable short-term memory!
Young players should definitely try their hand at this, though they might need help with understanding how to move a tile where they want it to go. If they like Floating Farmer, who knows, they might be game for a Rubik’s Cube next! Do check out Mens Sana’s other puzzle games; the Farmer games have a similar concept and look but different mechanics.
Final Verdict: I Like It A Lot 