Dinkum Review for Nintendo Switch

The farming-sim genre is an interesting one, because there really isn’t much variety between games – but that doesn’t seem to be a bad thing. No matter if you’re playing Stardew Valley (my personal favorite) or Animal Crossing or the more recent Coral Island, you know that you’re going to move from a crowded city to a peaceful rural setting (usually a farm or an island), move into an old farmhouse or set up a primitive campsite, and spend your days fishing, farming, mining, crafting, and building relationships with the locals. When a new farming sim comes out, it usually retreads this familiar territory while adding a little unique flavor of its own. Enter Dinkum, an independent release designed entirely by James Bendon, released in 2025 after three years in early access.

The game starts on familiar ground: tired of your life in the grim, gray, identical boxes of South City, you take off for a vast, undeveloped island to live off the land (I named mine Oz—both a reference to Australia and a nod to Wicked For Good, which comes out this week). Initially armed with just a sleeping bag, a tent, and the company of a kindly old woman named Fletch, you can develop the island into a fully functioning town that’s designed any way you choose. You do this the same way you do in any other farming sim: breaking rocks, chopping wood, catching bugs, growing crops, fishing, trading goods, hunting predatory animals, and constructing buildings. You can spend your days however you want, although you do have tasks, milestones, and favors that earn you in-game currency and new items.

Although most farming-sim games follow a similar script, they do generally need to have things that set them apart from the competition. Animal Crossing takes place in real time, Stardew Valley is rendered in throwback 8-bit graphics, Coral Island has an environmentalist story angle, and Story of Seasons/Harvest Moon was the progenitor that started it all in 1996. Dinkum’s unique angle is that it’s set in a facsimile of the Australian Outback, and almost all of the game’s elements – animals, fruit, fish, rocks, trees, and much more—have real-world Australian counterparts. Animals that you encounter right from the start include kangaroos, porcupines, dingoes, and armadillos, while trees and bushes yield things like bush limes, bananas, and yellow wattle flowers. The island is large and diverse, split into biomes that mirror the real-world Outback, and you can spend a lot of the first few days just exploring the different areas. An interesting difference between Dinkum and other farming games is that you actually have the ability to swim, so you can cross rivers, bays, and inlets with relative ease.

I don’t know if this is an issue with the Switch edition (which just came out on November 6^th) or the game as a whole, but the graphics for Dinkum leave something to be desired. You can orient the camera at whatever angle you choose, but if you have it totally horizontal, you’ll notice that huge chunks of the background just appear out of nowhere the closer you get to them. There’s also noticeable lag and some glitches with how the animals move, although the player character generally moves pretty smoothly without issues. If you tilt the camera overhead, you don’t get the issues with the background graphics, but I felt like I had to mention it.

Dinkum doesn’t take place in real time—you start the game in summer, and every second is about a minute of in-game time, which means an in-game hour passes in about a minute in the real world. This means that you can experience all four seasons without having to wait a full year in the real world, unlike in Animal Crossing. One slightly frustrating feature is that opening your inventory or journal doesn’t automatically pause the game—I found this out the hard way when I had my inventory open and was suddenly getting attacked by a crocodile. You can pause via the options menu, but I think it would be a bit more convenient if the game paused automatically when you’re not actually interacting with the environment.

Dinkum put an interesting Australian-flavored spin on the traditional farming-sim game, but I don’t know if that’s enough for it to stand out in a very crowded genre. I mostly enjoyed my time playing it, although there were some graphical and performance issues, and I really like that it’s developed by a single independent designer rather than a large company. You can really tell that this was a passion project and a love letter to Australia, so I do appreciate that. Ultimately, I think if you’re a fan of Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley and looking for something new and a bit different, Dinkum is definitely worth a try, but if you’re not already invested in the farming-sim genre, it may not be enough to interest you.

7/10

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Ian Robinson-Lambert

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I've loved video games ever since I started playing Mario Kart on my parents' Wii back in seventh grade. These days, you can find me playing a mix of historical RPGs and horror (shout-out to Assassin's Creed and Resident Evil). I also love a good puzzle, and of course I still have a soft spot for the Super Mario series!

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