There’s a running joke that IT admins are among the laziest bunch of workers you’ll find out there but, conversely, that’s actually what you want from them. If they can figure out how to do something with a simple bash/PowerShell script they’ll do it, just so they can spend time not doing that thing manually. Hell there’s countless examples of me spending almost as much time building a script rather than doing something manually, just so that I didn’t have to do the same task repeatedly. That then blossomed into a fully fledged career based on my automation skills, something which was weirdly lacking in the market some 15+ years ago. So the thought of automating a little drone to farm various resources intrigued me but it also did the worst thing a game could do.
It made me think of work.
The Farmer Was Replaced’s premise is pretty simple: there’s a little drone that you can control with a simple programming language. You have your farming patch of a constrained size which you can plant, harvest, till, and do all sorts of other farming related activities on. The goal is to harvest as much of the various resources you have so you can unlock new abilities to…harvest more resources to unlock more abilities. Simple enough concept to grasp and for anyone who’s done a modicum of scripting or programming in the past it’s essentially another form of coding logic puzzle.
The game does a great job of hiding the complexity of programming the drone behind the new skill unlocks, making sure you’re not overwhelmed with an abundance of programming options right from the get go. The language itself is very straightforward and a lot of the potential annoying edge cases are handled seamlessly under the hood. The initial grids are also small so you’re not having to conceptualize large arrays in your head in order to maximise your output. The visual also helps a lot with this as there’s really no cost to simply running the program and watching it run.
The challenge initially comes from the increased complexity in optimising your harvest based on the number of squares you have and the number of crops you’re farming. This is initially pretty easy, just plant as much of each crop as you need and harvest as you go, but quickly ramps up in complexity as crops have different needs, spacing requirements, and other optimisation factors that make things increasingly complicated. These are all things which can be solved formally if you’re so inclined or if you’re like me through conceptualising something, watching it fail miserably, then trying again the next day once you’ve had enough time to noodle on the problem.
The second challenge that I ran into was the resurfacing of my training as an engineer wanting to make the solution modular and scalable from the get go. This is, of course, waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more work than what it’s worth really as you’ll spend more time thinking about edge cases, nested loops and various other methods to get around your current limitations. Higher tier unlocks will then make all of those duct tape and bailing wire solutions null and void, allowing you to replace your hacks with single lines. I felt both relief and frustration whenever I did that.
Which brings me to my opening point: this quickly started to feel like real work to me. The long periods spent staring at the code, figuring out the optimum solution, trying it then repeating it all over again had me feeling like I was solving a customer’s problem. Heck I even got to the point of linking up my vibe coding setup to it in order to see if it could spit out some good solutions (quick hint: it didn’t, but then again I didn’t actually give it the API description or anything) which is at the point I started to question what the hell I was actually doing. Was this actually something I was doing for fun, or was I just cosplaying being back at work? So I had to put it down.
The Farmer Was Replaced does everything right which, unfortunately, is what led me to not wanting to play it anymore. The idea is great, the programming language implemented well and the overall ramp up in optimisation challenge is something that I feel like wouldn’t be out of place in one of Google’s notorious interview questions. But all of that just put me back into work mode and that’s just not what I want when I’m trying to play something to unwind. Is it a bad game then? Hell no and indeed, if you’ve been interested in programming and want something to work on in a fun way, there’s precious few other games I know of that do it as well as this one. But for me? It’ll sit on the shelf, maybe rolled out one day when I want to get the kids into programming.
Rating: 7.0/10
The Farmer Was Replaced is available on PC right now for $14.50. Total playtime was 2.2 hours with 23% of the achievements unlocked.
