Japan's Biggest Farming-Sim of 2026 Is Finally Coming to the US
The horror-vibes Village in the Shade is out just in time for Halloween
I'm not sure what's more frightening in Nippon Ichi Software's upcoming farm-sim Village in the Shade: the prospect of mythological horrors jumping you in the dark, or the eerily recognizable loneliness and isolation permeating Kagatsu Village. Village in the Shade is already out in Japan, where it quickly became one of NIS' most popular games of the last several years. It's not due out internationally until Oct. 27, but ahead of its PAX West demo, Polygon attended a hands-off preview and caught a glimpse of why Village in the Shade is already making such a splash.
The preview begins the morning after a terrible incident. Your chicken, your first animal, that perennial symbol of new life and fast profits, is dead. Murdered. Quite brutally, in fact, with blood and feathers mingling into the coop's fresh paint. The sun is shining today, however, and there's work to do.
NIS America localization director Mike Stebbins takes us through a standard morning routine. The crops need watering, the furniture needs placing, the weeds must die. The chore list is unchanged, despite the previous evening's gory horrors, though as is practically mandatory for a post-Stardew Valley farm game, a small selection of quality-of-life improvements makes completing them less dull. Your basic watering can, for example, pours in a single animation until you stop it, so covering large swathes of dry soil takes minimal time. When placing items on larger furniture like tables, you can select which part of the table the item sits on and where it faces before placing it. Time also ticks by in the standard way of Stardew and Story of Seasons, a welcome return to slower living for those of us who, like me, found Fields of Mistria's quicker pace off-putting.
Now it's time for a trip into the village. But as Stebbins walks his farmer down the path, which, like the rest of the game, seems like it fell out of an oil painting, someone is blocking the way. A man from the village, a self-proclaimed atheist, kneels at the end of the path and the shrine there. He's praying fervently and asking gods for whom he holds no faith to help a young woman. You have no idea who she is or what she's going through. You're as separate from the villager's problems as your home is from the shrine and, you suspect, as separate as the villagers are from each other. A distinct feeling that this disconnection might have something to do with Kagatsu's problems — more than whatever ripped your chicken apart — lingers in the air.
The people of Kagatsu Village prefer it this way, or profess to. Talking about problems comes dangerously close to breaking the town's rigid code of conduct, written to deter scrutiny into things best left hidden. Everything is fine here. Admitting the opposite is, it seems, too horrifying to consider.
On to less serious things. The village is small and charming, though we only see a few streets of it for now. It's spring, and a handful of cherry blossom trees brighten the surrounding density of foliage with their irrepressible cheer. A vendor displays their wares on the street corner next to a battered truck, where two chickens wait for someone to take them home. It seemed unfair to buy another so soon without knowing what lurked in the coop, but Stebbins' farmer lacked the funds for it anyway. The vendor stocked a wide range of items, from decorations to food and clothing, including (somewhat worryingly) funeral attire, but the nearby general store is where all the farm essentials like seeds and inventory expansions come from.
Another scene unfolds when the farmer steps inside that store. A timid young girl chats with a surly, pointy-toothed carpenter, and he offers to buy her anything she wants in the store. It’s a reward for being so good, he says, though with loneliness emanating from her in waves, it's easy to see he's doing what he can to make her a little happier. She chooses a large bag of candy for them to share. The unexpected kindness visibly moves him.
Stebbins opens the map, which shows a library and clinic, along with a manor house, a construction site, and further up the mountain past your farm, what looks like a hiking trail. There's a fishing spot at the top of the trail, and on the other side of the mountain, a waterfall fishing spot, and icons show where each villager is at that moment. Then he takes us on a tour of the area, up the mountain path, into the mine for some crafting materials, then through the dusk-dappled woods and back into town for a meal at a small diner where locals gather in isolated togetherness.
Village in the Shade's distinct visual direction is striking, and its little details are even more attractive. Sunlight ripples in patches across the river's surface. A small cluster of lily pads peeks out from under the bridge, and at one of the fishing spots, a local occasionally sets up a camp chair and a cooler. How it uses light and lines deserves equal praise. Smeared, foggy darkness and indistinct edges lend an air of menace to the mines, and as the shadows of trees blot out the evening sun, you feel some nameless evil closing in around the village.
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Night falls, and you break the code. No one in Kagatsu should venture outside at night. But you do, prompted by the ghost of your ill-fated chicken who leads you into the farmyard and down the village path. Nighttime is ostensibly the darker half of Village in the Shade, where terrors from Japanese folklore stalk the streets for reasons unknown, though the preview showed just the beginning. A spirit resembling a large-headed old man chases you through the village's narrow streets, and you find yourself in a woodland clearing at the center of which is a large, glowing tree. Someone's inside it, begging for help.
The preview ended here, and Stebbins assured us the nighttime sequences are less linear after this introduction. The after-dark segment was a tease, more than a preview, with little indication of what to expect once the sun goes down. Not that it mattered to me. The daytime portion already made me confident in what NIS is doing with Village in the Shade, and Oct. 27 can't come soon enough.