Harvest Hollow Farm

Harvest Hollow Farm is comfort food in game form. You plant, tend animals, chat with villagers, and slowly turn a scrappy plot into something you're proud of. There's no urgency, and the daily loop is soothing rather than demanding, which is exactly what I want from a sim I open before bed.

Touch management is tidy. A radial tool menu keeps your most-used items a thumb-tap away, and the game auto-selects the right tool near crops, which cuts down on fumbling. The one place it stumbles is inventory sorting, which gets fiddly late game.

Battery use is minimal and it runs on basically anything. There's an offline energy setting that dims effects, which I left on permanently without missing much.

What we liked

• Relaxing, low-pressure daily loop
• Smart auto-tool selection
• Runs on almost any phone