You can even get married to one of them eventually, and they’ll come back to your farm to help out once you’ve been hitched. Roses, another currency that you must grow yourself, help in that regard too, but are a little more special: With them, you can earn new stuff by flirting with strangers. Cashews are what you use to upgrade your weapons in town. You can sell your crops for cashews, which are one of the game’s currencies. You’ll have to fight off the mutant inhabitants of the land as you go about your business, but they’ll only start attacking your crops directly at night. You’ll explore the world to find new crops to plant and upgrades - like animals that boost productivity or tools to improve your fighting abilities - and tend to your crops during the day. The gameplay works in cycles: action-packed farm runs (three per season, four seasons in a year) where you balance farming, exploring, fighting, and time. This is a strange mish-mash of ideas and genres, but it all works together much better than it should. Imagine a version of, say, Animal Crossing that breaks out into a technical fighting game every few minutes and you get the idea. That’s a lot of jargon and a large assumption that you’ve played Stardew Valley, but here’s what that means in practical terms: You farm and get married, but also shoot and dodge an onslaught of incoming bullets with some regularity. This is no Stardew Valley, but it certainly has some of that quirk and charm, mixed with the action and chaos of bullet-hell rogue-lites. They’ll try to eat your crops, but they’re also trying to kill and eat you.

You see, Atomicrops farmland isn’t just any farmland - it’s a farm in a post-apocalyptic wasteland infested with mutated slugs and rabbits, among other nasty things.

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