Kynseed review

Kynseed is a difficult game to pin down. PixelCount Studios formed after the closure of Lionhead Studios, known for the excellent Fable series, and the DNA of those games can be found everywhere in Kynseed. It goes much further than Fable ever did though, embedding all the social mechanics you might expect but expanding further into the territories of farming, business management and more, creating something that’s a bit cosy, a bit creepy and compelling enough to potentially be a “forever” game.

The Fable influences are immediately evident from the game’s set up and world, in that it feels like a classic, slightly dark, fairy tale. You spend the first few hours of the game as a child, who, along with your twin sister, was adopted by an old lady who lived in a shoe. Years later your long-lost uncle turns up and brings you both to his farm in Quill and from here the main plot takes you down a story with a surprising amount of depth to it, with some sinister twists involving time, age and the titular Kynseed.

This fairytale motif is one of the reasons I enjoyed my time in Quill so much. There’s a mythical Fae race who you’ll learn about as you explore, first as a child and then as you get older. Books are dotted around teaching you about the world and its relationship with the goddesses who oversee everything, while ancient proverbs can be found that give pithy insights into the flora and fauna you find around the world.

The writing is genuinely lovely, filled with the cheeky English charm I always loved in Fable. It’s everywhere, from the dialogue you share with townsfolk through to item descriptions, such as the tooltip for apples reading “An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Just throw it at them”. In a lot of games this is the sort of text I’d gloss over as I mash A to keep things moving, whereas in Kynseed I took the time to read every description, proverb and often the books too.

You’ll learn the basics of gameplay as a child, although more mechanics open up as you age. What starts out as a fairly straightforward farming game quickly moves into a lot of in-depth mechanics thrown at you on a near daily basis, and it can become a bit overwhelming. While it can feel like a lot, you’re never punished for taking a moment to breathe and just focusing on getting the farm set up the way you want it, or spending an in-game week just making friends, socialising and completing jobs for the people in your village. It’s a smart way to introduce you to the game, and despite the narrative rumbling in the background, your childhood in Quill feels like a relatively low stakes way to learn about the game.

Things take a turn in adulthood though as the darker elements of the story come into play, and you’re left with the long-term goal of increasing your renown across the world of Quill (again, more Fable DNA). You can do this in a number of ways, including combat or running businesses. Combat is a system I’ve not personally come across before, built around managing cooldowns rather than taking turns. You start runs by entering certain parts of the map, equipping your gear and then you’re thrown into the first of about a dozen fights with enemies including Hobs, hag, nymphs and other mystical creatures. You attack by pressing the corresponding face button to where the enemy is standing, while moving up and down on your side of the map to dodge or block attacks. It’s a cool system, and gives some good tactical control over how you take down enemies, but I personally found it often got a bit too chaotic when you’re trying to dodge, attack and still manage your stamina, so I opted to spend most of my time elsewhere.

For me, that meant a lot of farming and shop work. Farming mechanics are fluid and the daily chores never felt like they took too long, and while I mainly focused on crops, I had a small area set aside for animals too, including pigs, cows and chickens. The pigs were my favourite, as they’re rideable and make exploration much quicker, but I liked spending a bit of time with my animals each day to feed them and make sure they were happy. My favourite job on the farm was taking my fruits, vegetables, honey and other crops into the house and cooking them up into meals in the kitchen. Each type of meal comes with its own mechanics that involve chopping up ingredients before cooking them while you keep an eye on timers or roll out pastry or do fun little timing-based minigames. The game lets you batch cook items too, and there are perks that increase your outputs so I found it was really quick and enjoyable to get some higher value items to sell.

And where did I sell them? In the local shop owned by yours truly! There are loads of different types of shops around the world to own, including general goods, blacksmiths and even inns. The business elements are surprisingly robust, and while you might be working behind the till at the start of the game, bartering with the locals and stocking shelves, you can quickly afford to hire staff, set the rotas and control the supplier orders to optimise your shop and make some decent money.

This is all just scratching the surface of what you can do in Kynseed. There’s fishing, blacksmithing, potion mixing and more, plus a whole host of social features including romances, weddings and offspring. The titular Kynseed gives you the ability to pass down skills from generation to generation, and when you pop your clogs you can continue the story as your child, so between that and the many different mechanics it really does seem like it could be one of those games you end up playing forever.

Kynseed is a lovely looking game, capturing the spirit of some of the genre’s best while putting its own, slightly dark spin on an aesthetic that would usually be described as “cosy”. Characters are distinct, as are the flowers and crops you’ll forage and grow, so I never felt like I was stuck looking for something I didn’t recognise which can sometimes be an issue in these games. The music is really lovely too, with musicbox tracks playing in the background and adding to the feeling you’re in a fairytale.

I did have a few issues with my time in Kynseed though. Building friendships can take a bit of time, especially when you need more friends to help complete construction jobs in the world, however I loved the way that NPC’s would dole out little tips and proverbs about the world every time you improved your relationship with them, so it was never a chore. The biggest issue I had on the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game was crashes, which were unfortunately a regular occurrence. The game saves at the start of every day so you never lose too much progress, but it’s enough that it’s annoying, especially when it can happen multiple times in the same day. (Update: This has now been patched via an update, so ensure your game is up to date!)

Kynseed is a great combination of RPG and life sim, packed with mechanics to sink your teeth into and a fun story tying it all together. If you long for the cheeky English charm of Fable then you’ll find it in spades in Kynseed, which stands alongside the best in the genre.