16th of December 2024 was the day Sun Haven finally shipped to Nintendo Switch in Europe. An early Christmas gift or something you should wait before buying? In this post, I’ll share a Sun Haven Nintendo Switch Review for 2024.
What is Sun Haven?
Having played Sun Haven on my PC, I looked forward to it being released on the Nintendo Switch! It’s another cozy game to enjoy in my living room’s comfort. This is even better if you usually sit by your desk for work. A small change of scenery, even if it’s just another room in the apartment, is nice.
Sun Haven is a game made by Pixel Sprout Studios and described on the company’s X as: ”Multiplayer Farm-Sim/Fantasy RPG. A human town, monster city & elven village filled with farming, magic & dragons.” It’s a farming sim with adventure added to it! You can choose from seven different races to play from and customize your character. If you want some romance in your game, there are 23 different romanceable characters in the game as well.
But what are the impressions so far, one week after the release?
The Pros – Getting Started
The pros are obvious: you play on a larger screen and use a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. It takes some time getting used to. Sometimes I think the font used makes the text a bit difficult to see.
- Zoom levels – You can adjust the zoom settings a bit. Play around until you find the correct zoom level you like. I needed to zoom in a bit to see what I was doing.
- The art style – The art style is cute! I like that the characters you talk to are shown with a large portrait. You can see their emotional responses to the dialogue.
- Holding down the X-button with a tool selected will make your character use the tool on the tiles surrounding you – better than Stardew Valley’s tile-by-tile clicking.
- Easy to see progression in your skills – In Sun Haven, you have five different skills to level up: Exploration, Farming, Mining, Combat, and Fishing. You see when you gain XP in a certain skill, it makes it easier for you if you want to get better at a skill of your choice. The skill tree is nice and you can choose from many different things making your gaming life easier.
The Cons
No complete review of Sun Haven on the Nintendo Switch without bringing up the cons as well as the pros.
The controls don’t feel that intuitive and some things aren’t covered in the basic tutorial. Untilling soil using your hoe was one of those examples (it’s having your hoe selected and pressing the B button, thank you Reddit!). One Google search later gave the answer. It feels a bit slower to switch between your different tools using L and R buttons instead of the usual number keys or scrolling your mouse wheel. But it works just as well as when playing Stardew Valley on the same console.
On that note, combat can feel a bit more tricky on the Switch than you might be used to. I prefer using crossbows over swords and wasn’t aware of the fact that you can use the stick on the right joy-con to aim a bit better. Once I figured that out, combat became to be a bit easier.
Other Things to Consider
I’m not a huge fan when it comes to decorating, but I remember looking up how to adjust a rug when I played on PC. Again, something simple to search for but also something that could be covered in the tutorial.
Oh, one thing worth mentioning when you create your character; if you hit the confirm button it doesn’t just confirm the change you made last. It’s the confirmation for everything you did until then and it will start your game file. Had to redo my file because of this, since I wasn’t done customizing.
Unfortunately, there is no way to sync game files between your PC and Nintendo version of the game that I know of, so you will need to start a new save file. I haven’t timed it, but it feels like it takes a while longer to load the game file on the Switch version. Not sure exactly why that is, but loading a save takes time!
Conclusion
To sum up this review of Sun Haven for Nintendo Switch, is the game worth buying? The game as such is a port, so if you enjoyed the content on your PC, owning it on your Nintendo Switch as well is just a nice touch.
Honestly, if I were you I’d wait a bit before buying. During the few days I’ve owned and played the Switch version, I’ve had the game crash on me five times already. It’s not that fun to lose a whole in-game day’s worth of progress to an unforeseen crash. The last one happened just before I started writing this review and I thought it might since my whole farm from the bridge onward was a mass of gigantic pixels.
I think this can be a nice cozy game, but right now I think Pixel Sprout Studios might want to start working on a patch, getting rid of whatever it is that causes the game to crash. Good game so far, but a bit glitchy for being a port of a game that works well on the PC. Five random crashes on a game file being on Spring 10 feels a bit much.
Addition to the Review
On January 21st, 2025 a new patch dropped, version 1.7.4.3e. One thing I noticed by playing rather than reading patch notes was that there had been some improvements to stability. Another thing was that right after the save file was loaded, I got a short tutorial on the controls. There is also a better indicator when you place or move items.
The patch made some things better, but the game still crashed once and I received a black screen when going to bed to save that day, bye bye progress…
I hope that in the coming patches, more stability improvements are made. As of right now, I don’t invest time playing a game that may or may not work. I’d rather play something else where I know my progress won’t be randomly lost.
One thing I wish that Pixel Sprout Studios would bring to the game is a slider instead of fixed zoom levels. This would give players the ability to adjust the zoom more precisely to their liking.