Ataraxia

Ataraxia is a small-town life simulation game that takes cues from “cozy” games like Stardew Valley while having a more melancholy tone and some horror elements. As a recent arrival to a wooded island, you must make friends in the community and make money by crafting with found materials while learning about the island’s sometimes bloody history and investigating something strange in the woods.

The daily gameplay loop of waking up, tending your garden (once you have plants to tend), crafting, and visiting various locations is satisfying; the only fly in the ointment is that the game obscures how much energy you start with and how much each action takes, so it’s hard to plan out how much exactly to do. But as there are no hard deadlines here, it doesn’t matter especially much. And with the helpful to-do list, I never lost track of what my goals were.

The prose is lovely, especially in the more surreal scenes, and the atmosphere is strong. The characters are delicately drawn, a little more grounded than usual for the genre; that they're a bit older and have loves and losses and career changes behind them is a nice change of pace. The island’s history of beasts and pirates and missing children is intriguing to uncover, doled out piece by piece to propel you through the game.

Sometimes the game genre and the horror trappings sit awkwardly alongside each other. When I realized the cryptic utterances of the oracle in the forest were just to tell you what kind of gift each potential love interest likes best, that was jarring, and the resolution of the plotline with the strange presence in the forest being just an artifact you can put in your museum was a bit anticlimactic.

But this is a minor complaint. I enjoyed playing Ataraxia, all the more so for its sharp edges and dark mood. I romanced an ex-sailor, adopted a cat, grew various fruits and veg, opened a museum, and maybe got possessed a little bit. I had a good time.

I would recommend Ataraxia to anyone who has ever looked at a cute farming sim and gone “okay, the idea of this is somewhat appealing, but what I would really like is if it had some eldritch forest deities and a sense of quiet tragedy, and if all the love interests seemed like they were probably at least 30.”