Thank You Stapleton for providing us with a review code!

De’Vine: Heavenly Acres is a series of games made in the RPG Maker engine with the first two in the series being card battler games. Heavenly Acres does something different from its companion games and goes in the direction of farming and monster taming.

There seems to be a trend with these open-ended games just throwing you in with little to no explanation and Heavenly Acres effectively does the same too once you choose your character. There is a tutorial that explains the mechanics as they happen, but one can easily tell this was a feature added after its Early Access state but before the full release. Fortunately for some, Heavenly Acres is a casual experience so messing up has little consequence. You’re encouraged to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t with moments of trial and error here and there.

The two main aspects of Heavenly Acres are farming and monster taming. This is actually the first 2D farming simulation that I’ve played so I have nothing to compare it to. Farming has a lot of aspects to it. You can clear fields with a scythe, chop down trees with an axe, construct buildings with a hammer, and fish in the waters with a rod. All of these actions consume energy. What is interesting about the farming aspect is that they contain some RPG mechanics. You can “critically strike” when performing these actions and whenever a critical strike happens, it doesn’t consume any energy.

Farming leads to crops and crops fill both your hunger and energy meter. While letting your hunger meter drop down only has an effect on resource gathering, letting your energy drop down to 0 knocks you out and causes a debuff. The only way to fill up hunger is to eat, while energy can be filled by multiple venues, including eating. Farming is quick, efficient, and manages to be quite fun as the system Is active. You’ll get into a nice rhythm of farming goods, crafting items to sell, exploring dungeons, and raising monsters.

Monster taming is the turn-based portion of Heavenly Acres where 200 creatures can be tamed to fight against other monsters or sometimes people. Monster taming is presented in a 2v1 or 2v2 format where you have two monsters on your field with up to four others in the back row. Their moves are divided into categories that use a mana system for attacks with various buffs and debuffs. If your creatures run out of mana, they can still use the attacks but at the cost of their HP. An element system is tied to each monster and their attacks so it ends up being the typical “fire creatures are weak to water” and whatnot. While the system starts incredibly simple, the amount of monsters and the versatility means there is depth to be found.

Farming also ties into monster taming as feeding your creatures different foods can permanently increase their stats. While there are obviously going to be monsters that are simply stronger than others, this system allows you to pick your favorites and use them throughout the entire experience if you so chose to do so. To tame monsters, you first must find and defeat them in battle, then create them through an item called the Munsta Masher. Unfortunately, every monster you make through this method starts at level 1 so I feel like the system discourages you to tame late-game monsters and stick with the ones you found early on.

Heavenly Acres uses a colorful art style with a combination of sprites and 2D drawings. While the art is good, it also is static so there are not many flashy actions in combat. It can also be a little blurry as the original resolution is quite small, and the settings are basic. Fullscreen settings only stretch the window to your monitor and not scale. The settings don’t save either so you have to make these changes every time you boot up the game.

In regards to controls, you can either control with a combination of keyboard or mouse or entirely with the keyboard. Whether you are left or right-handed, there are multiple options on both sides to accommodate your style. While the controls themselves take little time to get used to, menu navigation does not. It manages to be very clumsy in feeling, so you end up making a lot of mistakes and errors that you otherwise wouldn’t in similar games. I feel the main problem stems from that there are few hard confirms when making choices. Choosing items or menus or even settings feels way too loose. One time, I accidentally exited the game when I was trying to change my settings. Fortunately, the game saves every time you sleep or rest so I only lost 30 seconds of progress from that moment.

In terms of morality, Heavenly Acres can get questionable if you make it such. Regarding things that are rather unavoidable, there is the aspect of RPG-style violence consisting of killing animals and other creatures. Some attacks also have a blood-splatter effect on them. You’ll also come across plenty of supernatural creatures and demonic entities. Some of them have magical abilities or attacks. One monster that I saw was a Grim Reaper-like character. Sexual content starts somewhat lightly. There are a few playable and non-playable characters that can have revealing clothing such as a sleeveless crop top. Sexual content does go further with the romance system. The actual romance mechanics don’t go beyond marriage and some kissing and flirtatious dialogue, but one of the features is that your character can marry anyone who is deemed a “misfit.” This means same-sex romance is possible. There are some ethical choices that can be made such as purposely getting drunk, being mean to others in dialogue choices, or stealing from NPCs. According to the Steam page, Heavenly Acres received an ESRB rating of Teen for mild language, but from my time playing, I didn’t see any.

There is a lot of content within De’Vine: Heavenly Acres that I didn’t even touch upon for the price that it is being sold at. While I wouldn’t say that any of Heavenly Acres features are exceptional, they are all done well enough that enjoyers of life sim hybrids can get dozens of hours of enjoyment. While morally it can get questionable if you dive deep into the system, a few of them are optional to witness such as the entire romance mechanic. Getting past the learning curve and unintuitive user interface may reward a person with a unique experience of farming goods and raising monsters.