Explore a massive open world filled with wacky and chaotic crops in the upcoming farming simulator Southfield.

In Southfield, players are put in the shoes of a friend-shaped blob named Bud. Bud is a gooey creature who likes exploring, building and helping out others.

So, how are the crafting mechanics? What can we expect from the full game? Is there any automation system? Find out the answer to these questions and more in our preview for Southfield.

Southfield‘s open world houses its wacky fauna and flora, as well as a handful of NPCs. As of right now, Southfield‘s NPCs hand out fetch quests and serve as shopkeepers, providing the player with ways to restock on certain items every once in a while.

The game is, at its core, an automation farming simulator, letting the player take it easy while the machines do the work. The player can set up their farm and use different machines to create a simple chain of production powered by conveyor belts, launchers and crafting stations.

Southfield also features one of my favorite quality of life features, which is a universal grid for players to build on. Having a grid that all objects adhere to fixes 90% of the jank that comes with building in open world games, and it is a surprisingly rare feature for some reason.

Southfield‘s performance is probably the weakest part of the experience right now, as the game consistently struggles to hold its frame rate. Even basic things like chopping down trees or switching equipped tools seem to be too much for the game to handle, which is disappointing.

Filling an open world game with physics objects is a bold move that comes with a performance cost, which Southfield currently struggles to pay. It’s doubtful that Southfield will be a Steam Deck-friendly game, as it has some hefty hardware requirements listed on its store page, and even playing it on a PC that surpasses those requirements is still not enough to get a stable frame rate.

The worrying part is that Southfield features automation mechanics, which are notorious for being taxing on performance. Those familiar with automation games know that optimization is a base requirement of the genre, meaning that Southfield is doubly expected to perform well for the sake of its own mechanics.

Southfield has a big focus on physics, and that isn’t exclusive to the plants and objects, as the game’s bouncy protagonist, Bud, can also turn into a ball and roll around the open world.

Sadly, Bud is no 3D platformer mascot, as his moves are quite limited. Not only does it feel like you are capped at a disappointing speed when rolling, but the charged jump barely carries any momentum, making for some disappointing movement mechanics.

The camera and throwing controls also seem to be completely off for some reason. The camera controls feel like someone remapped the game’s mouse movement to the right joystick and didn’t bother with polishing it further, while the throwing mechanics overshoot your reticle by a lot, making it impossible to know where things are going to land.

Southfield‘s Steam page mentions experimenting with crops and how they might play with each other, but as of right now, the game doesn’t feel as interactive as it could be.

A good amount of my playtime was spent mashing things together hoping something would happen, but even the most basic things like throwing an ice fruit at a fire fruit seem to result in nothing.

The eating mechanic is where some of the fruit’s quirks come into play, as most of them will visually change Bud and give him some weird property. It’s a shame they don’t interact with each other as often as they could, but it’s nice that they at least interact with Bud, even if a lot of the interactions are just stunning you for a few seconds.

Southfield was delayed halfway through 2024, and that was probably for the best, as Radical Forge needs to improve the game significantly before it is even acceptable as an Early Access title. The game does show a lot of promise from its trailer, but that has failed to translate into its demo and beta.

I would like to say this is a “wait and see” sort of situation, and that Southfield can honestly go either way, but I’m honestly not too hopeful. The last update we’ve gotten through Steam was on June of 2024, which was the one announcing the game’s delay.

Seven months is not a lot of time as far as game development goes, but it is a lot when you delay a game and barely provide any progress updates. The only real dev update between the delay and now is buried away on a Discord server and only mentions a new tutorial, UI rework and new plants, which are not the issues I would be focusing on considering Southfield‘s current state.

Southfield is set to release at some point on Microsoft Windows (through Steam’s Early Access).