Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition [Switch]
Chibig’s Deiland: Pocket Planet is a chilled-out title that allows you to manage and take care of your own pocket-sized Planet. As the sole inhabitant of a tiny world, with resources to farm, tasks to complete and visitors to welcome, Arco must manage his energy and appetite in order to do what is required around the land. You’ll meet Mûn - one of a few characters crossing over from Chibig’s previous title, Summer in Mara - who starts you out with some basic tasks and recipes, returning over time to check how things are going. Enemies will appear that you’ll have to deal with, and the guests who come to visit will give you various objectives to complete, such as gathering items for them, or using items they provide to craft a meal, or a new type of tool upgrade.
It does take a little bit of getting used to the controls, as rotating a planet to spot stuff as you run round it isn’t always the most straightforward of things (particularly when you factor in Joycon drift!). You do eventually get the hang of it, but at times where asteroids are crashing down and you must rotate quickly to get buildings out of the path of danger, I found myself reverting back to having no coordination whatsoever. There’s also the chance of rain every now and then, and rotating to direct the rain at your crops and trees is beneficial - as is re-filling any wells you’ve emptied, but it doesn’t automatically prompt you for this like it does with the asteroids, so I kept forgetting to do that each time it rained and being annoyed every time my wells were dry. Likewise, with rain you will sometimes encounter lightning storms - and these can be absolutely disastrous for your planet, wiping out trees and all the hard work you’ve put in, so do your best to aim the clouds away from anything flammable!
Deiland has a very cute appearance, with an adorable little world that evolves as the seasons change. You can build fences and wells, upgrade your house to add on additional crafting areas; including a Workshop, Kitchen and Laboratory - and you can plant trees and bushes wherever you like. Each visitor to your planet has a very unique look, in both their own appearance and in their ships, which helps to make them easily identifiable for when you’ve got a bunch of tasks on the go. Pressing down on the D-pad will bring up your task list, and up allows you to look through your inventory, so making sure you’ve got enough to complete tasks before visitors return is good. Visitors show up at random, aside from two that can be prompted, and this is probably the part that is the most frustrating about them and their quest-lines. I’d often run into an issue where I need a particular visitor, either to purchase something from them, or just to clear their recent task - and they’d take forever to show up. Selling stones to Goliath the pirate (since he pays the most), and purchasing everything of interest every time you encounter a visitor seemed to be the best plan for me, as it meant that any time a new quest was triggered, there was a good chance I’d already have the item(s) required to complete it. The music of Deiland is very simple, with the world being fairly serene and quiet until visitors or enemies arrive - which causes different tunes to play depending on the guest. There’s also an additional planet, Ankora, that you get to visit, as well as a couple of other places off-planet, each with new enemy types and overall feel. Enemy designs are varied, although we’ve seen a fair few of these designs in other titles - including, most recently, Kitaria Fables, and this is always something we’re not sure how to react to.
As you progress, you will learn new recipes to enable new materials and items to be crafted, and these are often given in response to tasks that you receive from visitors, tasks you’ve completed, or due to upgrading your house. Placing things in the world, such as fences, is somewhat frustrating, as there does not seem to be any way to get these to snap together in any decent formation - and rotating them to get a decent angle requires a good bit of running around. Similarly, planting trees can be a little finicky at times, as these must be planted near a source of water, and it’s easy to completely block the way in to the pond in doing so, but you can always just chop a few back down or build wells to allow trees to be spread out further. Combat feels horrible, as the hit boxes for both yourself and enemies are wildly out of whack, so you’ll often miss enemies or take damage when they’re still miles away. Eventually you’ll gain the ability to cast spells, but these too feel useless. Thankfully enemy encounters aren’t all that common (and even less so if you activate certain prayers at the crystal on your planet), and they’re not really difficult - they just don’t feel enjoyable.
I did run into a few technical issues during my time with Deiland, including a relatively frequent glitch that wouldn’t allow me to summon Mûn or go to sleep, needing me to exit the game and load again to resolve. Similarly, on a couple of occasions whilst travelling to or from planets, arriving at the new planet would spawn me in an empty world, with just the sky visible all around, that also required me to exit to resolve (wasting my spaceship fuel in the process).
Overall, Deiland is definitely a relaxing game that’s great to just chill out with. It’s not the best farming sim-style game we’ve tried, and the combat definitely leaves a lot to be desired, but it still satisfied that repetitive itch for when you just want to peacefully follow some tasks. I did find myself getting quite sucked in, and was glad that I could continue on after the (unbelievably long) end credits to finish the last couple of quests I had to do. Once you’ve finished everything there is, there’s just nothing more to do, which felt quite odd to walk away from at that point. Sure you could continue on looking after your crops, but there’s really no point, even though I first spotted a new wolf enemy after I’d 100% completed. There is an app for iOS/Android that’s free if you want to get a general feel for the game before you spend hard cash on it; however, the app is very much a mobile game compared to the Switch version. Gathering resources take a set amount of time rather than just taking a few hits, and the overall quality of everything is lower, so don’t judge the Switch port too harshly based on that! If this all sounds good to you, and you want to dive in on the Switch - you can pick up Deiland: Pocket Planet for 40% off, at £10.49 on the eShop until 26/09/21 (normal price: £17.99). Chibig also have a new Kickstarter up and running, for Ankora: The Lost Days, which again sees some crossover of characters and locations, so if you want to check that out, you can find it here.
In the end, we decided to give Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition the Collecting Asylum rating of 6.5/10.
Have you played Deiland:PPE yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to EvolvePR for the Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition Switch review code!
