Super Farming Boy is a bizarre farming sim about chain reactions with a Cuphead inspired style

You've never played a farming sim like this before. Blending a few genres together where Stardew Valley collides with a Cuphead like style. Disclosure: a key was provided to GamingOnLinux.

I'm really struggling to give you a good explainer on this one. It has incredibly simple controls, since it was designed for mobile as well as desktop — but don't let that put you off. It's very accessible and the weird mixture it offers is something rather different.

The story goes that you control the character Super, whose mother and friends have been captured by the evil KORPO, who then hires you to work your own farmland so you can earn everything and everyone back. KORPO even sends you mail about how slow you are. Bit rude huh? So you have to go through lots of challenges to make money each day, to keep progressing through upgrades to make earning monies easier and keep unlocking more.

With the farming side of it, Super Farming Boy is all about initiating silly chain reactions. When you pull a crop that's ready, it will interact with tiles around it to cause chain reactions and combos so it's not just a case of planting, watering and waiting. You need to figure out all the combinations that work together, to maximise how much you earn. Some crops are also massive, and need these chain reactions to hit them to bring down their HP to harvest them. Pretty fun when you get going! The higher the combo, the more monies you get.

I also had to laugh the first time I saw the special Fever Time mode after you've done a few combos to build up your super meter, which activates a wild mode (pictured above) where crops around you grow instantly. The whole game is just thoroughly bizarre like this all the way through. I love it though, when we have so many Stardew Valley-likes, this is breaking through the dirt to find a little gold.

You can also buy a few critters to help you do various things around the farm. Everything is pricey as heck though, that KORPO really makes you sweat for it. Thankfully, once you learn a few combos from pulling various crops, you'll soon be earning lots of monies quite easily.

In a way it's pretty streamlined since you don't need to worry about inventory management, allowing you to just sit back and relax a little more while you build up your farm to make some awesome reactions.

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The Cuphead style to it is pretty clear, which actually looks quite nice without being too derivative. It has its own unique charm to it thanks to the setting and all the quirky characters.

It's in Early Access so no formal review type-thing from me yet, other than just summing up that it has a really great idea and I'm excitedly looking forward to them finishing it with all the extra content they have planned. Like boss fights (yep, in a farming game), new seasons, more missions and the list goes on. It continues to scratch a very weird itch in my brain I didn't know I needed.

Works perfectly on Desktop Linux with Proton 9.0-4, and they made numerous tweaks to have it run nicely on Steam Deck directly too.