My Fantastic Ranch is a sweet and cozy new management simulator game that mashes together the polygon aesthetic from Minecraft and Roblox with sweet, spice and everything nice.
The Management Side of Owning a Ranch
The game is completely enriching in a “fantastical” wonderland full of lush fields of flowers, glowing mushrooms and shimmering crystals. But your tutorial quickly teaches you there is more than corralling super cute animals.
It’s a pretty standard management style with a barn to keep all your feed, and a tack house to keep track of your animals’ belongings, two per every standard tack house. You make their stalls so your critters have a place to rest up and My Fantastic Ranch includes a cute roaming area for them to wander through, play in and eat up. After taking good care of your creatures, you gotta work on your business side of things by teaching tricks and readying up for the season.
Another part of your responsibilities is training your creatures. There are two places for this, one is a corral where visitors get to ride around on your creatures and the other is an aiming type of game where creatures practice their magic and archery by charging magic at targets.
Overwhelmed already? Don’t be, because you won’t be alone in managing your ranch. In the tutorial, you get to place down an office building that allows you to hire two people. They each have their own specialties already which can include either helping with food or helping with cleaning and the more they work for you, the more talents they can unlock.
Assigning creatures, trainers and visitors to Archery training or Riding practice can improve their skills so they earn stickers that show what they are good at. That way when later ceremonies unlock such as tournaments and festivals, you can use your creatures and students that are good at their designated training to sweep up competitions and impress even royalty.
Absolutely Beautiful Aesthetics and Designs
My Fantastic Ranch employs the full use of the rainbow by creating gorgeous designs of both creatures and humans alike. Each dragon, unicorn, and human has unique features dependent on their type of species whether they are a Fire Dragon, Stone Dragon, Light Unicorn or Candy Unicorn. The students and trainers we get to see are all completely adorable, with bright vivid hair that can have ombre effects and seeing such diversity amongst them too is also just a treat amongst all the colorful creatures and decorations.
It’s so fun to be able to scroll in and see the details in their expressions when they are riding and having fun. The creatures have a variety of animations from them strutting around, sleeping in the corral and performing tricks come festival time. There are so many entertaining things to watch even when you aren’t actually managing anything or enjoying your off time to watch your idle characters train.
The ranch is completely up to you depending on how you want to design and organize it. Space becomes more expansive the more you play so you can focus on a variety of different training for your creatures so that your festivals are that much more fun to watch. The creatures come in such a vast variety that it’s almost a game in itself trying to collect them all.
What I Would Look Forward To
There is a lot to do in the game and there’s a lot of room to progress. The buildings can be updated and the tournaments can get harder, there are tons of different creatures that you can collect but I would hope that the devs wouldn’t stop here. Since the game centers around a fantasy landscape, it would be so fun to see more types of creatures being introduced later in the game such as griffins, kirins or something big and fluffy. Not only would this expand to more animals in the game, but perhaps the types of tricks and training that you can do so there are plenty of learning curves or specialties for the creatures that are introduced in the game.
I already love how you can expand and decorate the farm, the buildings are all nicely uniform and they line up nicely. Maybe adding different colors and styles later on, perhaps winnable through tournaments would be a fascinating objective to reach in the game. It would add more personality to the game and there are sure to be many different types of farms that all players find they can tinker with. For festivities and training, maybe you can buy different types and sizes of balls that the dragons roll on or different targets within training.
This game has come up with such a great foundation that makes for a fun experience expanding upon it and making it even bigger and more diverse with what players can do and collect would make it more interesting in the long term. It is a pretty pricey game, but it’s fair for all that there is to do and if they expand on it later then it’s all the more worth it. If they came out with DLCs that were sizeable in their expansion, I wouldn’t mind paying extra to have different types of creatures available later or different styles of buildings.
All in all, this game was super fun to play and I found myself doting on so many of the characters and creatures. I’m eager to see what else Piece of Cake Fabulous game devs come up with next.
Jordan is a student studying Digital and Print Journalism at the University of North Texas. After discovering how much fun gaming journalism can be, she hopes to make a career in it once she graduates. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys playing games such as Genshin Impact, Ace Attorney, and Fire Emblem or watching Murder, She Wrote late at night on weekdays.
