I wish I could stomach Immortal Life's clunky controls long enough to fall in love with a cultivation fantasy farm sim

GamesSimI wish I could stomach Immortal Life’s clunky controls long enough to fall in love with a cultivation fantasy farm simWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: YiFang Studio)

Immortal Life - Several characters sit around a stone table outdoors in a lush forest

Farm life sims are one of my favorite genres, but they still don’t offer a great variety of settings and themes: They’re typically vaguely modern and set on sunny islands or in rural valleys. Immortal Life, a life and farming sim based on the xianxia genre of Chinese fantasy about immortal heroes, offers a refreshingly different “cultivation” spin on the genre—referring not to the farming, but to a genre of fantasy fiction that involves spiritual cultivation. Unfortunately, its extremely clunky controls and dated visuals make it hard to recommend.

(Image credit: YiFang Studio)

Immortal Life - A player uses magic to water crops with a rain cloud

Unfortunately, Immortal Life makes an immediate bad impression if you’re playing with a gamepad. Despite claiming to have full controller support for both Xbox and PlayStation, the only control scheme available uses a Nintendo layout so that confirming and interacting are mapped to my B button and canceling or returning are on the A button. Keyboard controls are remappable in the menu—not always a given, so I’ll consider that a small win—but not controller buttons, so I’m stuck with the unintuitive experience and sometimes get keyboard control prompts anyway. It’s the kind of oversight I’d expect from a new early access game, not something that had already alreadybeenin early access on PC since 2022.

The cooking minigame is decently fun, though not too complex; I’ve got to pull ingredients off a table to chop, steam, or fry them in the correct order to assemble a dish. Fishing is pretty simple too, just a button press when a fish sinks my bobber, but I’ll gladly take that instead of overcomplicated, finicky fishing minigames. If I progress further, Immortal Life promises a housemates system, which is the ‘just friends’ alternative to the marriage systems other farm sims have.

(Image credit: YiFang Studio)

Immortal Life - A player holds a fish overhead in the inn kitchen to prepare a meal

All the while though, Immortal Life’s interface, character models, and environments all feel like they were designed to be crammed into Nintendo hardware of a decade ago. It’s not uncommon for farm sims to be visually retro, but I don’t get the sense that Immortal Life is intentionally evoking the Nintendo 3DS graphical style for nostalgia’s sake. I genuinely wondered if I’d missed the memo that this was a new port of an older game. But it isn’t.

Immortal Life does have very lovely character portraits, which is a small point in its favor. And the characters themselves are an initially charming bunch of optimists ready to roll their sleeves up to help restore the town. One of them is even an eager fan of the heroic cultivation stories that our group has found itself the protagonists of.

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That’s the larger disappointment of Immortal Life; that it could have been a great entry point to cultivation games for English-speaking farm sim fans. My own exposure to the genre is still very shallow because official English translations of Chinese xianxia and wuxia fantasy games are so rare. Players mostly have to rely oncommunity curatorsand fan translations to get started. I’d love to see a cultivation farm sim catch the interest of the wider community, but the small hassles of Immortal Life add up too quickly for it to be the standard-bearer.

(Image credit: YiFang Studio)

Immortal Life - Li Mengquing stands with other characters in the rain near a construction site encouraging them to earn money from bulletin board jobs.

Immortal Life has been in early access on PC since April 2022 and launched its 1.0 full release this month with the completion of its main story, the housemates system, and other customization elements for your house and character. It’s worth noting that Immortal Life is $17on Steam, which is a good bit cheaper than some of the games I consider to be the bestgames like Stardew Valley. For some, that’s a price point at which you may be willing to take a risk for a new type of farm sim story. Just know that you’re going to have to grit your teeth through all its clunky parts to do it.

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