I’m not going to profess to know much about the Gauchos of South America, but I’d be interested to find out if these legendary cowboys spend as much time fixing fences for people in real life as they do in Gaucho and the Grassland.
Instead of being bequeathed a farm by your dead grandad though (the usual set up for farming games) you get given your recently deceased dad’s hat which transforms you into a legendary (and moustachioed) Gaucho. You’re tasked with bringing order to the regions surrounding your homestead, which are experiencing extreme weather conditions due to their guardians going missing.
Narratively it’s a fairly standard structure, and mechanically it feels the same. You’ll land in a region, scope out the labyrinth in the middle which is currently being guarded by a big monster and then set out to help at least seven citizens in the area with their various issues. Rinse and repeat for each of the game’s three regions.
Considering the bulk of your time is spent helping people, the quests here are a real mixed bag. As mentioned at the start, there seemed to be a significant amount of time spent fixing fences for people, but even at their best the quests aren’t particularly gripping, with jobs including wrangling lost animals or putting out small fires. At worst they’re borderline broken, with one recurring quest requiring you to dig up tickets for a pet groomer. Cusco, your faithful hound, can investigate holes with a tap of LB but his pathfinding is awful, and on multiple occasions he’d get stuck on a hole, wandering around it but not digging until I saved and loaded back into the game.
Punctuating all this is the aforementioned crafting, farming, and building. Despite looking like a major component, it can actually largely be ignored. While gathering and crafting is essential for most quests (you’ll always need more grass ropes), placing buildings and bringing animals back to barns only really gets used for a couple of quests per area. These quests unlock the ability to add buildings and animals to your own homestead, which you visit between clearing regions, but there’s no real incentive to invest your time or resources here. It created a bit of weird dissonance between my expectation of the game and what I actually need to do to progress, and left me feeling a bit disappointed that there wasn’t a great farming game to sink my teeth into.
Once you’ve helped the prerequisite number of people then you can investigate the labyrinth, which involves fixing up totems to scare away the monster lurking in it. You can then head into the guardians realm and get all this mess put to bed. These sections were actually a lot more interesting to me: each guardian was in a different predicament which involved a different solution to free them. Taking place in this psychedelic otherworldly realm, it was much brighter and made for a more visually appealing experience than the largely foggy regions you spend most of your time in. The music throughout the game was suitably jaunty, but it went a little bit harder here and added that extra bit of tension to these sections. The final sequence, in particular, had some great music that really upped the ante and added a sense of jeopardy that the gameplay couldn’t quite match.
The gameplay loop is clearly defined and although a lot of the quests didn’t excite me, there’s something oddly relaxing about the rhythm it settles into. The cast of characters are colourful, if not memorable, and moving around the environment is satisfyingly smooth, especially on Alazão, your trusty steed. The game doesn’t overstay its welcome either, and you’ll be able to beat Gaucho and the Grassland within four hours unless you want to spend more time customising your homestead or helping out more citizens.
If you’re into your low-stakes farming and crafting games then you may find Gaucho and the Grassland is a fun way to kill a few hours. It’s not going to redefine the genre but if you don’t mind fixing a few (dozen) fences in between breeding chickens and building barns then there are far worse ways to spend your time.
