Welcome to your enchanting new life in a magical world of wonder and adventure! Tales of Seikyu by ACE Entertainment and Fireshine Games brings Japanese mythology to the farm sim genre this Steam Next Fest with an amazing demo. Seikyu, an island haven hidden far from the human world, is a sanctuary where Yokai residents live freely in human form. Settle into your homeland, help expand the town, and uncover the secrets of the island and your long-lost family!

Fox Farms and Shrines

One thing I noticed right off the bat with Tales of Seikyu is that there’s not a lot of character customization. You’ve got your guy/girl character choice, but aside from that your appearance is set. That’s pretty usual for a life or farm sim, but what I’m getting is that the game has a very particular story that it wants to tell. You’re landing on Seikyu Island with your fox companion – your sister Kon – not just to settle on your farm but to find more clues about your parents. For whatever reason, your parents have disappeared with all of the other fox spirits, leaving you and your sister as the last to unravel the mystery.

Part of what you’re unravelling are your own powers. Visiting fox shrines gives you access to the spirits of your ancestors and new abilities. They teach you how to transform into different animals, as well as how to teleport between shrines for fast travel. It’s going to take you some time to get a handle on your abilities, but even mistakes aren’t game breakers – they’re game changers! Your first form isn’t fox, but boar, and rather than needing tools like an axe to gather resources you can just knock down trees and break up rocks with your tusks.

And while you’re the only fox spirit, you’re not the only yokai on the island. Everyone in Tales of Seikyu is a yokai of some kind. Even some buildings are yokai themselves! The enemies are also yokai. What separates them from the friendly yokai isn’t very clear, but it does grant us some excellent opportunities for combat.

An Idyllic Town

Tales of Seikyu’s graphics are quite nice. The design of the main town definitely gives Kyoto, with the way it weaves and winds up stairs and around itself. Having studied abroad a summer, the design is super accurate, including how easy it is to get lost in. The contrast with the more traditional farmhouse and other rural locations is also very nice. You can build a bunch of different crafting stations and furniture in the traditional style to give both function and aesthetic – even building off of the farmstead in the world!

There’s a quality to the animations that is giving MMORPG, though Tales of Seikyu is very much a single-player game. The transformation animations are very cool, but in general they do feel a little disjointed from the world itself. Floaty animations aren’t a killer, and they’re easily fixable in a later patch. Plus, this is just the demo! Just the time to give ACE Entertainment some constructive feedback.

Yokai Watch Out!

And then there are the characters! All of the character art that pops up with the dialogue is gorgeous and richly detailed. The contrast is a bit strange against the less detailed overworld, but that’s easy enough to get over. With everyone being yokai, they are easily distinguishable from each other with strong designs. You’re not going to mix up the giant otter fisherman Toreleon with the almost elven, buff as hell Hephaestus. Nor are you going to mix up the cool, calm Nyotengu with the deer-centaur Yoni. 

Yes, a genuine DEER. CENTAUR.

Tales of Seikyu also promises fourteen love interests from the jump, with potentially more to come. Most of them you can easily meet within the first day of gameplay, and most all of them are definite candidates. A couple of the ones listed as marriageable characters surprised me, though. No spoilers, but the furry community is going to be eating well tonight. 

A Very Promising Future!

Having played a good number of farm sim type games, it’s easy to tell when one is doing the bare minimum for the genre or really going beyond. Tales of Seikyu, even with just a day or two of gameplay in the demo, shows that it really can reach infinity. I’ll for sure be playing it on my own time, and hopefully we can bring you a full review for it in the future!

Tales of Seikyu is in Early Access with a TBA release date. As of publication, the demo is still available on Steam.