You can love your job with your entire heart, but deep down, I firmly believe what most of us want is a quieter life in a peaceful world, where time moves at a slower pace. It’s part of the reason why cosy farm simulators have become so popular over the last decade: we all have a burning desire to slow down, to take stock, and to enjoy the smaller moments in life. To have time.
Cattle Country, from developer Castle Pixel (Blossom Tales) is an ode to this desire. It steps in the footprints of Stardew Valley to image a world where you can take your time planting crops, building out a farmstead, raising animals, mining, and getting to know locals. While it does lean a bit too heavily into the Stardew Valley formula, it differentiates itself enough with its neat cowboy-themed world and characters, creating a space that is lovely to inhabit.
Even when your day is occasionally interrupted by drama on the range – vultures can attack you at random, and bandits will sometimes pop out of trees to accost you – there’s an easy, breezy sense of charm to life on the range. You can spend your days how you want. You can fish or farm or mine, and there’s no consequences for wasting time.
You can also blast through these activities and tackle various quests at speed, if you so choose. Cattle Country has a sense of moreishness that encourages you onwards. It’s something not all farm simulators achieve.
Yee-haw, Cattle Country!
With streamlined daily activities, and mining challenges that are brain-tickling, you’ll want to keep forging a path forward. Most importantly, there is little friction in these gameplay systems. While there are elements of grind, in that you’ll be upgrading your farm equipment and tools by mining, gathering ore, smelting bars, and going through a crafting process, the satisfaction of completing your latest task is highly motivating.
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If you’re somebody who wants to spend time in a world, becoming completely absorbed by the daily flow of life, Cattle Country presents an ideal backdrop. Whether you’re spending time blowing up the mines or wooing your cowboy beau, you may fill each in-game day with joy. How long that joy lasts will depend on how deeply you invest yourself in this brightly-coloured world, however.
Where Cattle Country somewhat loses focuses is in its overarching quests, and how they shuttle gameplay along. As you begin the game, you’re given basics tasks, so you become familiar with the gameplay loop, and how best to spend time in this world. But quickly, these tasks become larger and more repetitive. Catch 20 fish, and you get given a well-earned reward. But then you’re saddled with a quest to catch 100 fish, and so on, and tasks begin to seem mammoth.
You expect, in some point of your journey, to be given more flavourful quests to round out your journey – but these were few and far between in my playthrough. Across the first hours of the game, I rarely stumbled across new quest lines, so I was left to make my own fun.
In the end, I chose to see the game’s basic fetch quests more as overarching reminders, to complete them as daily activities while I roamed free, establishing my chicken farm, and winking at my favourite neighbours.
It meant I could pass the time as I wished, living the life of a cowboy (complete with my cool bandanas and hats) while not feeling the pressure of striving for new and ever-more-unreachable goals. If that loosey-goosey direction appeals, then Cattle Country certainly delivers.
From mini shoot-outs to cute little outfits and architecture, it presents a bright, semi-historical world to live in, complete with a tiny saloon and a jail cell for those who break the law. While Cattle Country isn’t quite unique in the world of farm and life simulators, it does just enough differently to make it a warm and wonderful experience.
Three-and-a-half stars: ★★★½
Cattle Country
Platform(s): PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation
Developer: Castle Pixel
Publisher: Playtonic Friends
Release Date: 27 May 2025
A PC code for Cattle Country was provided and played on a Steam Deck for the purposes of this review.
