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Fae Farm is an offline MMO disguised as a cozy farming game.
Let me explain:
1. The NPCs are cardboard cutouts and only exist to give you fetch quests and sell you stuff
2. You spend the majority of the game grinding the dungeons. The only way to finish the game is through a lot of dungeon grinding. (not farming, taking care of animals, getting married, etc)
3. Everything is on a linear progression system. You unlock one dungeon, then the next, and then the next, in a specific order, and can't progress without following this very linear path
4. The majority of quests/tasks/missions in the game are just fetch quests. Toward the end of the game it is literally just one fetch quest after the next.
Farming doesn't really serve much purpose. The seasonal seed system is convoluted and completely unnecessary. You can only buy the same seed bags for each season, and then need to purchase additional fertilizer to transform the crops into seasonal crops. Why do you need to do this? The answer is you don't. In fact, you don't need to farm at all. You can just forage for vegetable-like substitutes to use in cooking. Crops don't have quality, so there's no point in putting time into farming to level it up or increase profits. Farming is also tedious. There are no sprinklers, so enjoy wasting a ton of energy/mana each day watering your crops all the way through to end-game. There's a potion that makes it rain over you, which I suppose could work to water crops, however I completed the game and never even had a chance to make the potion.
Ranching animals also serves no real purpose. You automatically get a barn and a coop, so you don't need to work toward buying them, which is sort of boring. Then you can't really upgrade them, either. Animals are vending machines. Put food in, get item out. They don't have a relationship with you, so you can't befriend them to earn better quality products. The petting/brushing system is buggy so you need to step away from the animal after petting in order to re-engage them to brush. But don't bother doing either, because petting/brushing is completely unnecessary. The animals will produce the same items each day for eternity. Also it's cute that you walk your animal home after buying it, but have fun trying to buy 3-4 animals at once, because you need to walk each one home one at a time.
Fishing has been simplified far too much and also serves no real purpose. There's a limited amount of fish in each area of water and you can see the fish in the water. Catching them is mostly trivial, just tedious as you can't really do much to change anything about fishing other than upgrading your fishing rod, but I didn't notice any drastic improvements through all of the rod upgrades. There is no bait or tackle to equip, so there isn't any thought as to what sort of bait to use for what type of fish, or tackle that changes how the mechanic works... Nope, just catch a fish anywhere and exactly the same way every time. There's a surprisingly limited number of fish types, and you'll quickly get bored catching the same fish over and over all season. Fish are used in a few recipes but you can simply buy fillets from the fisherman, so you can pretty much skip fishing all together.
Critter catching is kind of fun, and I like the idea of placing them into habitats to get different resources from them. There's no museum or anything to donate fish or insects to, so their only use is to be converted into resources.
Selling things is a headache. You get a limited amount of market stall spaces to sell items, and they don't stack... So you quickly fill up the stalls for the day. You can obtain an additional market stall for your farm, but this doesn't really alleviate the problem much. But that's okay, because by mid-game you'll only be selling artisan goods which can earn you thousands a day with little effort. Which leads me to mining....
This game is about 80% mining and fighting monsters. It's really not a farming sim at all. The bulk of your time will be spent grinding the mines to reach the 25th floor. You'll do this 3 times over 3 different mines. To say it gets repetitive is an understatement. The mechanic for getting to a new floor might seem interesting at first, but it's literally just Stardew Valley's system with minor changes. Instead of breaking rocks to find a hole to go down to the next floor, you... break rocks to find a switch... that opens a door to take you to the next floor. So... basically the exact same mechanic, only slightly more convoluted.
There's also the necessity of crafting Seals to permanently unlock dungeon floors. This might seem neat at first, but it's literally just more work than in SDV where you simply reach every 5th floor to unlock the previous 5. Here, you'll go down 5 floors, collecting resources only to then have to go use those resources to craft seals, so the next time you visit the mines you can place them down to permanently unlock the floors. Same exact system, only more work involved. Fun.
So the mines will be the primary source of income. You can collect gems which you can then craft into polished gems at the artisan table. These sell for ludicrous amounts of money. So much, that any other form of making money is rendered pointless. No point in farming, fishing, animal ranching, etc... Just spam the mines for gems. That's it. Once you're reached this point of the game, you'll realize the game just boils down to doing this and slowly grinding down the mine floors until you get to the bottom of a mine. Which rewards you with... you guessed it, a big fetch quest.
Finally I just want to touch on seasonal events and the NPC townspeople. These feel like a complete afterthought. Each seasonal "event" is just held at the last day of the season, and it's basically just a fetch quest to get something. Cool. I *think* the town is decorated for the events, but it's so subtle that it's hard to even tell. Maybe if I saw the normal town side by side with the decorated town, but otherwise it doesn't really stand out as an event at all.
The NPCs in this game are the lowest effort implementation of anything else in the game. They are one dimensional cardboard cut-outs. One NPC is obsessed with frogs. 90% of his dialogue is about frogs. Another is obsessed with natural disasters. Most of her dialogue is just talking about natural disasters. She's also supposed to be introverted, but does not actually display any signs of being an introvert. She's very outgoing and talkative. The dates are basically the same for all the NPCs, just with dialogue swapped out. You just sit on a log and they talk at you for a while and then the date is over. This is repeated several times per NPC, just at different locales. Eventually (and rather quickly) you get the option to marry the NPC. This is rather uneventful and costs 10k currency. After the marriage, your NPC doesn't even live in your house. They just loiter around your farm area all day. They don't have much of anything new to say either, and don't provide any help on the farm or any new mechanics.
The rest of the town are just vending machines and fetch quest givers. That's all they do. They don't display interesting personalities... they have no backstories... they are just face and name that sell you things or tell you to bring them things.
Also if you're expecting a cozy and stress-free time, well this isn't the game. Not only do you have to grind dungeons (and deal with fighting monsters) in order to complete the game, but you also have very short days which are made worse by the fact that the game doesn't pause while you're in the majority of menus. If you're looking through storage? The day is passing by. Placing furniture in your house? The day is passing by. You can spend half of your day just managing your inventory.
I finished the main story line but I don't have any urge to want to open the game and play it anymore.