Farm life sims are one of my favorite genres, but they still don't offer a great variety of settings and themes: They're typically vaguely modern and set on sunny islands or in rural valleys. Immortal Life, a life and farming sim based on the xianxia genre of Chinese fantasy about immortal heroes, offers a refreshingly different "cultivation" spin on the genre—referring not to the farming, but to a genre of fantasy fiction that involves spiritual cultivation. Unfortunately, its extremely clunky controls and dated visuals make it hard to recommend.
Despite its different genre inspirations, Immortal Life doesn't dump the entire box of life sim conventions on the ground. I arrive as a fresh-faced newbie in a place called the Misty Valley. I've been recruited to bring my farming skills to the mostly martial-focused community of spiritual students called the Guiyun Sect. Instead of being inducted as expected, a natural disaster hits the valley. Along with my other intended initiates (a fisher, carpenter, and trader among them, of course) I begin to restore the sect and continue my journey of spiritual cultivation to achieve immortality. I'll do that by chopping trees and mining rocks off my new plot of land and then planting lots and lots of crops, as the farmlife sim standard demands.
