For a relaxing, near-idle game about cutting trees, April Grove sure sent me down an intense rabbit hole. Faced with its absolute nonchalance, I am powerless. I do not know how time works when April Grove is on my monitor. I am faced with undeniable progression in one place while witnessing total stillness in another. In my fourteen hours with it, there were times where I loved it for taking my mind off things and ones where I merely, dejectedly continued chopping.
Simulation games like April Grove find their beauty in the balance between their two states: work and interaction. The balance between them is usually heavily skewed towards the former—you will largely be logging to the rhythms of your axe and the faintly energetic ambient soundtrack. Before work begins, you will stop by the tiny community that can offer upgrades, food to up your efficiency, cosmetics, and a few lines of dialogue—a place to stop by now and again once you have collected enough resources to fulfill a goal.
Any issues I have likely stem from the lack of commitment to disrupting this balance. April Grove leans very heavily on the work side of things; it is a minimalistic game with very few interactions in spite of a steady sense of progress. Aside from your main goal as a forester given to you by April, the community’s guardian deity, characters may task you at most with one short quest. Other developments happen scarcely and randomly.
Sometimes, when you enter an establishment someone might have one new thing to say. Other times you may find the ever-tired postal worker asking you to deliver letters to the community. In other work sims like this, I typically viewed interactions like these as a reward for the extended work sections, but their appeal here wanes fairly quickly. The character designs are great (Colorgrave as always has their style on lock), but April Grove feels best when it does not interject itself in your flow.
There is enough to dig into so that growing attached comes naturally. If there are so few character moments, I would love to focus on the work part. Pressing a button enters you into the cutting state where the character will go at it on their own until the tree is down and all logs fall off for you to collect and sell, but you can also cancel the animation upon a hit and quickly re-enter said state to speed it up.
The trees have relatively short respawn timers, meaning you could stand in one place if you just hate that one particular tree or you can expedite the process by going around in circles to interact with different ones. The pace of work is at least partially dictated by the amount of effort you want to put into pressing buttons and customization, using the properties of unlockable axes, necklaces, and foods.
Running back to deliver someone’s mail after preparing for a nice work session pulled me out of the experience. Minimizing the amount of back-and-forth traversal is part of these games’ appeal, no matter how short the route is, so encountering the postal worker in the forest somehow feels more like a chore than the actual chore at the core of the whole experience!
More than anything, I think the lack of any autosave is a poor fit for the game. I experienced many crashes during my time with April Grove, so I began to get seriously paranoid about losing progress, to the point of quitting the game (which saves it) any time I got a full stack of logs, starting it again, and running back to my spot before repeating the process. In total, I still lost at least an hour of progress, if not more.
Lacking a strong identity and with crashes rolling back progress, April Grove comes as a cautious recommendation. The core chore is tight and nicely adjustable, it all looks and sounds great, so the big caveat here for anyone who enjoys a good grind on the side is the potential loss of progress. Otherwise, certainly worth the price for anyone curious to indulge in its lumberjack lifestyle.
Mateusz played April Grove on PC with a provided review copy.
