➕Nice cozy vibe
➕Magical elements add quality of life
➕Graphics


➖Performance issues
➖No voice acting
➖Disjointed story quests
➖Excessive collectable items with limited storage/inventory space
➖Very rough animations

The game world from a gaming perspective is very similar to other life sims like Stardew Valley or My Time at Portia - you start on a farm outside a small town full of NPC townsfolk, build relationships, explore, farm, ect. The town feels lively and full of NPCs, though you really only build relationships with about ~15 of the multiple dozens and dozens of NPCs. Still, I felt the game world was decent.

The narrative starts out decent enough - you’re a witch and crash landed on an island while flying on your broom. Unfortunately, after a few tutorial quests, future main quests are spread out ridiculously infrequently, often requiring multiple weeks before anything pops.

Very similar to other life sims. Farming, fishing, exploring, collecting, crafting. Potentially the only thing that stands out is the magical aspect. You can (eventually after a few months) craft a broom, there are ritual spells, you brew potions, you have a magical familiar, and you can teleport places. I really liked most of the aspects, but I also wish you were given just a few more things to start out with to differentiate this from other life sims. You only start out with a teleport, everything else requires copious amounts of resources, which by the way….
The items in this game are just nuts, and not in a good way. Each item has FOUR levels of quality and NONE OF THEM STACK. Even if there was no quality, there’s still a bunch of items to collect, but the quality system literally multiples the needed storage by 4x for items. I understand that later on in the game you unlock some pocket dimension storage which greatly helps, but it's really rough at the start.

Difficulty exists here only insofar as the fact that it’s hard to find things in game. If you say you need to collect a certain type of flower or log, good luck finding it without going to the wiki.

Very good. Everything looks lush, vibrant, and inviting. The NPCs look very detailed, sometimes a bit too much. Buildings, water, animals, all LOOK great.
The part where the cracks start to show is the animations and movement look and feel off, just a bit janky and not smooth.
From a technical side, I didn’t feel this game was well optimized. I consistently maintained around ~180 FPS on my 4090, but there were constant performance dips. I played fully maxed with DLSS originally on quality, but moved it over to performance.
I also played a bit with the excellent Lossless Scaling, which seemed to help with the performance dips.
Otherwise, I noticed no bugs.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | Windows 11 installed on SSD

Decent music, while it does start to get a bit repetitive, I enjoyed the cozy feeling it brought.
There is no voice acting, which I felt was a huge shame. Stardew has some bloops and bleeps for voices at least, and My Time at Portia has voice acting, even as rough as that can be, it's still there. Normally, I don’t care about voice acting, but in life sims, you should have some sort of character-specific language, whether its voice or bloops, to add personality to NPCs. That doesn’t exist here.

Not great, aside from achievements in the longer term, in the short term I was running out of things to do each day other than dump energy on logging/mining. This is not a great feeling for a life sim where the player will essentially be playing the same game over each day.

The Witch of Fern Island (WoFI) is a 3D, third person game that takes elements of other life sims like Stardew Valley and My Time at Portia/Sandrock and mixes in a slight magical backdrop to present a cozy and good looking game.

For my big negative, I would have to call out the narrative and gameplay elements.
For the narrative, I don’t entirely expect life sims to have a great narrative, it's more so the lack of narrative, which then feeds into the gameplay elements. When you start WoFI, you have about 4 or 5 quests that provide a small tutorial. After those quests are completed, you’re left to your own devices until you meet the criteria for the next one. I looked up the quests on the wiki, and was surprised to see how spaced out they were. The next quest after the few starting ones is about 3 weeks into the game (26th day), and quests after that require a lot of grind to meet the trigger conditions. What this means is that the quests are clearly not intended to be the focus point of the game.
This wouldn’t entirely be an issue if the gameplay was good enough to support the lack of quest involvement. Unfortunately, I spent numerous days waking up and going, “Now what?”. I didn’t feel the gameplay provided any meaningful hook to keep me entertained like I was in Stardew and Portia.

As for the positives, I found the graphics to be great. While the technical parts tell me the optimization isn’t the best and the animations were also rough, from a picturesque standpoint, WoFI looks great. Everything just looks lush and vibrant.

Overall, I cannot recommend Witch of Fern Island when better life sims are out there. I think that if WoFI provided a better pathway to engaging the player with more approachable mechanics as well as leaned more heavily on its magical backdrop, that this could have been a solid recommendation. Otherwise, you should look elsewhere and only consider WoFI if you have played all other life sims and want more.

Stardew review: https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/id/Synikx/recommended/413150?snr=1_5_9__402
Portia review: https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/id/Synikx/recommended/666140?snr=1_5_9__402

You can find my curator page here: https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/groups/Synik_GR

I love farming games in many faces but was reluctant to buy this because the graphics didn't look appealing, but am glad that I did.

I wished I could edit the character further and the different assets in the game do break immersion sometimes, but even for someone like me, who is very picky about graphics, the gameplay itself is incredibly fun and worth it 1000%! The story is different to the usual farming games, the music is lovely and the time balance between farming, crafting and exploring is well done. I keep finding new places, new secrets, the puzzles are intuitive to solve and fit the atmosphere, and the overall progress feels fair. Discoveries are fun, there are rituals and charms and a little shop in front of your house, and I'm really curious about the big background story.