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World's Dawn is an life/farming simulation by Wayward Prophet quite similar in nature to the Harvest Moon series, with a nice touch of fantasy RPG plotting to keep things interesting. Four seasons of the game, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter are in development, with the first two already released. Play as male or female, and engage in romances. Dawn of Worlds is a worldbuilding game usually played with a group of friends gathered around a tabletop. You start with the outline of a map drawn on a large sheet of paper and shape the land and world as Gods. The creator’s website publishes the full rules for how to play. This page is where I’ll document my experience. Your story begins. World's Dawn is a colorful life and social sim by David Grund set in a sleepy seaside village. Inspired by the Story of Seasons series, it features vibrant top-down graphics, a huge cast of quirky characters to meet and befriend, and charming gameplay.

• • Platforms:
  PC |
• Developer: Wayward Prophet
• Publisher:Wayward Prophet
• Release: January 25, 2016

World’s Dawn is a kickstarter-funded life-sim RPG very much inspired by the Harvest Moon series of games, in which your character farms, fishes, socializes with the residents of the town, performs tasks, discovers secrets and generally lives a mundane day-to-day life. If you’re the kind of gamer that enjoys low-key and generally drama-free games like Animal Crossing, you’ll probably enjoy World’s Dawn. With a simple, RPG-Maker aesthetic and lots of engaging, jovial characters to meet — and a few to romance — World’s Dawn doesn’t do a lot to push this kind of game into new territory, but it’s a pleasant enough diversion.

You start by creating a character and moving to Sugar Blossom Village. In the process of creating your avatar, you must pick preference for romance options. While cultivating a romance can be an important component of World’s Dawn, you are limited to only three potential mates out of a cast of nearly three dozen characters. Each of the Bachelors and Bachelorettes of course have strong and specific preferences, and growing, making, or finding gifts to win their favor can take a lot of your time in the game.

Like Harvest Moon and the “life sim” JRPGs that inspired it, World’s Dawn is set in a rural town with plenty of shops, a tavern, a temple shrine, and lots of natural features to explore like fishing holes, the beach, the woods and stream. Of course each area of the environment figures into the daily life of the town and the daily and seasonal quests that make up basic gameplay. You start by leaving your simple home and trying to meet as many residents as you can, which leads to a long, long series of running errands and doing favors for the people you befriend. You get a watering can, and seeds, and begin to cultivate your little farm. Farming is important: it provides income and it also allows you to raise food items that you can gift to romance partners and various residents.

The passing of seasons is an important aspect of World’s Dawn, as each season has three specific festivals and two markets and in each season, one of the festivals is tied to the romance option. At each festival there are special activities and goals and prizes for completion, and the seasonal markets offer specific ingredients for recipes, and the chance to enter cooking competitions or sell crops. Working the fields, exploring, or other activities use energy, which you recover at by eating or at night when sleeping. Keeping track of your ever-diminishing energy is important, but there aren’t too many character stats to micromanage.

With all the character interactions, shopping, crafting, farming, and a handful of secrets to discover that give special abilities or stat boosts, there is certainly no lack of things to do in the game. In general, the dialogue is well-written and characters are not overly verbose, as they often are in this genre. Visually, it can be hard to keep track of who the characters are and what they do. What’s lacking — and this may not be a negative, depending on why you play this type of game — is any real sense of urgency or real conflict. There are no “bad” characters, just a handful that are slightly snarkier than others. You’re not going to suddenly discover that the local tavern sits on top of a hellmouth or that the village is in the thrall of a long-standing curse. World’s Dawn has a clean, colorful RPG-maker aesthetic that isn’t cluttered with fussy detail and does a nice job of illustrating the passing of seasons. Character portraits are pretty generic, with hair color being the only real distinguishing factor between very similar looking faces. The music is upbeat and pleasant, if not terribly memorable.

Closing Comments:

There is real appeal to the idea of living in a little rural community where everyone is pleasant and quirky, where the rhythm of life and the gentle change of seasons are tied to working the land and the world’s secrets are not dark and menacing. That is the fantasy that games like World’s Dawn allow us to indulge in. World’s Dawn is a gentle diversion of a game without much in the way of surface tension or deeper drama. It has an interesting cast of characters, but proscribes our interactions with them and too often crucially frames relationships as a series of tasks or gifts. On a second thought, that might be true to life, too.

Version Reviewed: PC

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/WorldsDawn

World's Dawn Switch

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World's Dawn is a colorful life and social sim by David Grund set in a sleepy seaside village.

World's Dawn Download

Inspired by the Story of Seasons series, it features vibrant top-down graphics, a huge cast of quirky characters to meet and befriend, and charming gameplay. Soak in the enchanted, whimsical atmosphere of Sugar Blossom Village as you build friendships, find love, harvest crops, tend livestock, customize your farmhouse, compete in festivals, discover magical secrets and more!

Available on Steam.

Tropes contained in World's Dawn

• Aerith and Bob: Character names range from the mundane (Cole, Ellie) to the unusual-but-not-unheard-of (Demetri, Bellatrix) to the downright odd (Paxel, Sparrow).
• Ahoge: Cole has one. He's not stupid, but he is a rather free-spirited artist.
• All-Natural Gem Polish: Averted; you can dig up stones with varying degrees of shininess, but they're not worth much until you cut them at the table outside the mine.
• Animesque: Character portraits.
• Babies Ever After: Currently averted, though there's talk of the feature being implemented in a future update. It's unknown if the game will feature magical Homosexual Reproduction^note or if a Heartwarming Orphan will show up in town.
• Bookworm: A surprising amount of them. Fable, the town librarian, of course loves books and will talk about them almost every time you speak with her. Also, both Annabelle and Logan enjoy reading books in their spare time, and mention it from time to time, especially when Fable returns.
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• Character Customization: You can choose your gender and hairstyle (from four options). Once the game starts, you can also buy new clothes for yourself.
• Collection Sidequest: The Dusk Hoppers, marks in your Marks Journal, and at least one festival that has you looking for apples to feed horses.
• Canon Name: Your farmer and animals come with default names, though you can change them. You can also rename your farm if you buy a wood carving kit to change the sign.
• Chain of Deals: The secondhand trading game. Barley will start you off with an old novel, which he's sure someone in town will want. It's Up to You to figure out who wants the thing and to continue from there. Naturally, completing this will get you an achievement.
• Character Portrait: Everyone in town has several in order to convey their various moods.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: When you play LockBall, you and your opponent will change into red and blue uniforms, irrespective of what you were previously wearing. Naturally, this is to make things easier on the player.
• Color-Coded Stones: Once cut, gemstones are all identical except for color. Diamonds are white, sapphires are blue, amber is golden, and opals are black.^note
• Crate Expectations: There are crates and barrels on your farm and around town, but you'll only interact with one: your shipping crate. The other presumably contain farm and village stuff that's not important to you at the moment.
• Critical Existence Failure: Sort of. While other characters will comment if your energy is low, your farmwork won't be affected until you actually run out and faint. Of course, given the nature of the game, it's less 'existence failure' and more 'end the day and wake up sick tomorrow'.
• Dating Sim: One of the major components of the game, due to the popularity of that part of Harvest Moon. There are four men and four women available.
• Effortless Achievement: You get one for completing the opening scenes of the first day, and another for talking to everyone in town. You also get another for just finishing your first spring season (and considering it's basically impossible to die in this game, you could wake up and go right back to sleep all month with no real ill effects other than that you're not actually making progress).
• Equipment Upgrade: If you break enough rocks, the carpenter will agree to upgrade your pickax for you. You can also upgrade your watering can.
• Eternal Sexual Freedom: Despite being a very small, insular community with technology that resembles the rural 1950s, the town thinks absolutely nothing of homosexual marriage or of Cole and Amber living together despite being only dating; you, however, will have to wait until marriage to live with your sweetheart - and given that some of them will wax nostalgic about the perfection of your wedding night, you probably save anything beyond a kiss for marriage, too; it's entirely possible even Cole and Amber are innocently cohabiting (even though There Is Only One Bed in their house).
• Event Flag: A natural way to keep track of the possible Scripted Events you may be up for seeing.
• Everyone Is Bi: One of the options, at least. At the start of the game, you're asked if you're interested in men, women, or both. If you select 'both', then all available bachelors and bachelorettes may fall for you.
• Exposition Break: You'll get notebooks in the game which detail basic stats about the villagers and have hints and tips on village life. However, you're free to read these at your own leisure, meaning it's up to you when or if you take a break for exposition.
• Fishing Minigame: You line up your rod with a fish and then control how far you cast; the fish you catch depend on location and bait used.
• Frothy Mugs of Water: Averted; alcohol tolerance is even one of the achievements tracked.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The villagers will praise your 'impressive' performance in the dance festival even if you never show up.
• Gay Option: You can choose to tell the game you're only interested in your own gender, in which case members of the opposite sex won't activate their heart events with you.
• Gender-Blender Name: While Bloom isn't exactly a common name, most names associated with flowers are for girls. Bloom is a little boy.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All: There are 28 dusk hoppers (a mix of firefly and grasshopper) that you can find around town.
• Healing Spring: The hot springs at Fisherman's Spring will restore your energy.
• Heart Container: Eden Fruit will increase your maximum stamina as well as fully restore it.
• Heroes Love Dogs: You start out with a dog that you've brought with you. Marian and Quint also own dogs.
• 100% Completion: The game tracks your progress in a Marks Journal, and there are achievements on Steam.
• Ill Girl: Siloh, Sparrow's sister.
• Indie Game: World's Dawn can basically be summed up as 'Harvest Moon made by one guy'. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
• Informed Equipment: Rather than holding an item, it will simply appear in a speech bubble above your head. This cuts down on the amount of animation required.
• In-Game TV: You have a black-and-white TV with three channels in your house. The weather and news are on every day, but the third channel has a rotation of various shows. There's even an achievement for watching every episode of a medieval drama.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Small plants can completely block your path in the woods or around the edge of town.
• An Interior Designer Is You: You can change the look of your farm house. Specifically, you can pick the carpet rug for both your kitchen and table areas, bedspread pattern, curtains, flower boxes on your windows, the color of your dog's food bowl, and various decorations like a potted plant or large lamp. With the exception of your dog's bowl, you can also choose to go with the Spartan aesthetic and have no decoration, not even a bedspread. Decorative items have predetermined locations, however.
• Intro Dump: Barley gives you the 'Village Primer' that contains notes on the basic personalities of all the villagers. For the first few weeks, characters' names will also appear above their heads when you speak to them, just to help you remember who's who.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Seems to run on the standard 'one real second is one game minute' timeline. At 11:50PM, the game will insist that you go to bed and teleport you home, unable to leave until you sleep for the next day.
• Invisible to Normals: The Feral Shades, spirits who protect Sugar Blossom Village. You can see them, of course, and it's your job to win them over and convince them to return to their duties as protectors of humanity.
• Item Crafting: Mostly food.
• It's Up to You: The town has been deteriorating since the previous owner of your farm died. Since Feral Shades are Invisible to Normals, it's up to you to convince them to return the land to its vibrant state, which means the entire town's livelihood is riding on whether or not you're a good farmer.
• Justified Save Point: Like Harvest Moon, you write in a diary.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Liam keeps a cat in his clinic, and Benjamin's gruff exterior hides the fact that he likes his own cat, too. Sparrow likes cats, but can't keep one because his sister has terrible allergies. There's also a stray who hangs around the oceanfront area on sunny days and will follow you home if you feed it several times.
• Level-Up at Intimacy 5: Befriending villagers unlocks several goodies. It may be an event, an item, a hint as to how to find another secret, or just their blessing to marry a family member.
• Level-Up Fill-Up: Eating an Eden Fruit refills your energy meter as well as adding to your total pool.
• Life Meter: Your stamina. While working on your farm will deplete it, what's likely to eat up most of it is running around town. If it falls to zero, you'll pass out and wake up sick.
• Love Interests: Four men and four women. There's also the couple Cole and Amber, who are each others' love interests (the player cannot break them up).
• Magic Realism: For the most part, the game is pretty mundane, and almost all the things seen in town could be seen in some sort of real-world location. Then you run into a talking fox (who only talks when you're wearing a special mask) and the Feral Shades and fairies.
• Meaningful Name: Fable, a type of story, is the name of the town librarian.
• Mini-Game: Lock Ball, a previous stand-alone game by the creator, makes its appearance as the town's variation of soccer. Some festivals also contain treasure hunts or trivia quizzes.
• Mukokuseki: Everyone appears to be the same pale tan color, and it isn't stated if they're white, Asian, or what - the inclusion of fantastical hair colors does nothing to help racial identification, so they can presumably be thought of as whatever race the player wishes.
• My Local: Midnight Tavern sells drinks and is a common place for townspeople to hang out.
• Nature Spirit: The Feral Shades. However, they're not entirely nature-oriented; while one is devoted to respect for nature, others personify true love or hard work.
• NPC Scheduling: In keeping with the simulation of a small town, every villager has their own schedule of places they will go when not working.
• One Steve Limit: There are no duplicate names in the cast list.
• Only One Name: Everybody in town lacks a last name. Of course, with a cast of around twenty, it's pretty simple to keep track of who's related without last names.
• Pet Interface: If you feed your dog every day, you'll eventually be able to send it to town to buy items for you.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: The only difference is if people will refer to you as 'young man' or 'young lady'.
• Rainbow Speak: People's names are in blue, and items that are important are in yellow. Also, LockBall is always written in blue and red.
• Relationship Values: Naturally for marriage candidates, but the rest of the town has them, too, and they're just as important - most people won't marry you if you're not friends with their family, and everyone has at least an event or two to see based solely on friendship.
• Retraux: The game uses pixel sprites reminiscent of the original Harvest Moon, though character portraits are more modern.
• Run, Don't Walk: Averted; you can hold shift to sprint, but that will consume your non-refilling energy rather than a separate Sprint Meter.
• Save Token: You can save anywhere using your Pocket Diary, in addition to the one by your bed.
• Scripted Event: One of the main draws of the game is getting to know the townspeople through various events.
• Shout-Out:
  • You can eventually find a Mystic Ocarina that will summon fairies in certain locations.
  • One of the villagers is an odd girl named River.
• Sidequest: One of the main points of the game is befriending villagers by helping them in various ways.
• Simulation Game: Simulates most aspects of living in a rural farming community, including the passage of time, seasons, and the daily lives of townspeople.
• Slice of Life: Small-town farming life, that is.
• Spiritual Successor: To Story of Seasons and its like.
• Sugar Bowl: Like its inspiration, nothing particularly bad happens in Sugar Blossom Village. Even the town's nameTastes Like Diabetes.
• Supreme Chef: Sparrow and Orion, the town's baker and tavernmaster, respectively, are both considered quite good at cooking.
• Talk to Everyone: Your first quest is to talk to everyone in town, and speaking to everyone daily is one of the easiest ways to raise friendship.
• Video Game Caring Potential: As with most life sims, designed to invoke it. The townspeople are kind but often in need of a little help, you take care of your animals, and you can even feed wild animals or adopt a stray.
• Virtual Paper Doll: To a very limited degree; you can change your outfit and buy or earn various kinds of clothing. Most have a functional role, but there's a bit of overlap, and depending on the weather you may have a choice of reasonable outfits.
• Voice Grunting: Everyone has a few clips of sound that will play when you speak to them. Most are fairly simple, 'hello', 'hey', or a sigh.
• The Wiki Rule: Has one.
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Certain characters, such as Sparrow or Quint. Perhaps confusingly, Indigo's hair is green, not blue.
• Your Favorite: Everyone has one item they particularly love, plus others they like quite well. Gifting favorites is the fastest way to raise friendship.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: There are several kinds of clothing available. Wearing seasonal clothing is important, especially in winter and summer, as not dressing for the weather causes you to expend more energy.