Did you ever hear of the Syfy comedy starring Alan Tudyk called Resident Alien? The concept is an alien crashes on Earth and starts to get adjusted to life there, hiding who he is, while also dealing with the initial assignment that led to him ending up on the planet. Shinehill feels sort of like that, in that we follow what’s essentially an alien spy heading to an island for a recon mission to determine if the race should settle there, collecting biodata and resource information to determine if it’s worth it. The tone and concept feels similar, and it’s refreshing to play through a sort of farming and life sim where the focus becomes your mission rather than just being productive and getting rich following a regular routine.
In Shinehill, you’re a general alien donning a human form sent to investigate a potential invasion site. However, due to asteroids surrounding the planet, you crash land. Fortunately, your new neighbors mistake you for an individual who bought an abandoned farm and was expected to move in after a few months. After a bit of care at Dr. Jack’s, Mayor William welcomes you, shows you your new home, and lets you get on your way.
While this does mean some farming and exploration, like in life sims, Shinehill is also about maintaining your cover and keeping people in town from realizing who you are. For example, shortly after meeting with Mayor William, he asks if you’re okay. You need to keep disguise points high by offering correct responses and “typical farmer behavior” to ensure you don’t fall below 10% and make folks suspicious. So when he asks if you’re fine, you could say, “I’m fine. I fall down from space every day” or “Actually, I’m an alien.” Naturally, the former response grants you two points and is taken as a joke.
Staying in character is honestly a highlight in Shinehill. It’s because it feels like you’re trying to maintain a role, while also answer in ways you think folks will like. But at the same time, it’s handled in a comedic way. A good example is the test Stacy gives you when you go to get a weapon. She’ll ask you why you want to fight and want to do. The options always include one reasonable one and one that is a variant of “to kill.” So much so that the last question that asks what happens if you find a second sword, and the “bad” choice is “I’ll kill with both hands.” There’s also the matter of dealing with the person named Roo who actually was supposed to be the new farmer moving to town. While you will need to do some farming to complete your orders, it almost feels a little more like an RPG in that it gets very quest-focused and the socializing and life sim experiences happen along the way.
Shinehill is also a minigame-heavy life sim and adventure, which can be a mixed bag. Most are fine, and they always involve a Helpinator 3,000 screen coming up and a simple, black-and-white experience that typically only takes a few minutes showing up. For example, before you crash land in the introduction, you go through a shoot’em up along the lines of Astrosmash. When you visit the beach, you can catch crabs in a simple strategy game that involves blocking the critter into a single square by placing walls. There’s a mind-control one that involves working out the right order in which you force a bee to pollinate flowers. But sometimes, these feel a little out of place and weird, such as when you need to move a glass around to collect drops of an unspecified drink while avoiding human and dog faces so they don’t sip what you collected. Since these are so short, it never feels like they negatively affected my experience.
The only downside is, I would appreciate a few more patches. I experienced some seemingly random crashes on my Lenovo Legion Go running the latest firmware and Windows 11. It never happened in any guaranteed predictable fashion, so it wasn’t like I could avoid that action or report it. The first time, it came up when I took the training arena test to get my sword on the second day, but when I reloaded and went through it again things went fine. Once, it came up when I was going to head into my house so I could go to bed and save after 10 days. Another time, after I was about five hours in, it happened after I checked the map. And, since there are auto-saves when the indicator appears or you choose to sleep in a bed and you can’t just bring up the menu and choose to do so, it’s easy to lose a day’s worth of progress if things go awry. On the plus side, the developer is very active in the Steam Discussion Board taking bug reports and issuing patches, so it seems like some things that might have been issues for me in the past are completely eliminated now.
Shinehill is an unexpected delight, and it offers a Resident Alien sort of twist on the farming life sim genre. Is it still cozy even when you’re infiltrating a community and carrying out not-always-moral objectives? Shockingly, yes! It is a little buggy in its current state, but it feels stronger every day and is absolutely an unusual approach to a traditional type of simulation.
Shinehill is available on PCs via Steam.