There are some games I play where I know almost immediately what kind of experience I’m in for, and then there are games like Welcome to Elderfield, where I spent a good portion of its demo wondering what in the world I had gotten myself into. The cozy horror RPG from developer Chris Cote and publisher Kwalee launches on Steam on September 10, 2026, and while I can absolutely see the Stardew Valley inspiration in much of what it does, Elderfield itself feels like it belongs somewhere far stranger. In fact, after spending a few hours with the demo, I’m still not entirely sure what I experienced, only that I had a surprisingly hard time putting it down.
Part of that comes from the fact that Welcome to Elderfield takes the familiar idea of moving into a small town and turns the whole thing into something that feels like it fell straight out of an ’80s horror movie. I have a farm to take care of, and much like I would in Stardew Valley, I can spend time getting to know the people who live nearby. But there is something deeply wrong with this place, and the further I got into the Steam demo, the clearer that became. With Welcome to Elderfield launching on September 10, I’m actually glad the full release is so close, because the demo ended with me wanting to know a lot more about whatever in the world is going on here.
Welcome to Elderfield Is Delightfully, Uncomfortably Weird
Check out Welcome to Elderfield on Steam
More than anything else, Welcome to Elderfield is weird. Incredibly, delightfully weird. I wouldn’t necessarily call it scary, although I’m sure some people are going to find it frightening, especially once they start running into some of the more disturbing things Elderfield has hiding around town. For me, though, it was much more unsettling than anything else, almost like one of those dreams where nothing is overtly terrifying, but everything feels wrong. My time with the Welcome to Elderfield demo was nothing short of a nightmare that I, for some reason, just didn’t want to end.
The horror RPG’s atmosphere has a lot to do with that, and it’s probably my favorite thing about the game so far. Elderfield looks like this strange little town ripped straight out of the ’80s, and once night falls, its streets take on this dim orange glow that I absolutely love. There’s something strangely satisfying about hopping on my bike after dark and riding through town while that orange light washes over everything, especially when the occasional “ding” from my bike’s bell breaks through the quiet. It’s just eerie enough, just unsettling enough, to be almost cozy, simply because of how nostalgic it is.
More than anything else, Welcome to Elderfield is weird. Incredibly, delightfully weird.
Then there are the people who actually live in Elderfield, and somehow, they make the town even stranger. Almost everyone I met had something at least a little off about them, but the kids were somehow the weirdest of them all. One of them sent me into the local mall to “bop a Shopper on the head,” which initially just straight up weirded me out. The thought of a kid telling me to beat a human being was strange, but once I actually showed up to the mall, I learned that the Shopper this kid was referring to was actually a monstrous creature that I had zero issues with bopping on the head.
But there were plenty of things off about the adults as well. For example, I spoke with an old man who wanted me to turn his coat rack into a wife because he thought it might cure his loneliness. How would I do that except find some literal sticks and stones around town to make the coat rack sort of resemble a wife that this lonely man could spend the rest of his life with, of course. I mean… tell me you’ve encountered something stranger than that in a game like Stardew Valley. That’s right. You can’t.
But it’s encounters like these that ultimately had me enthralled with Welcome to Elderfield, because they really sell the world. It isn’t littered with jump scares just to remind me that it’s a horror game. Instead, there’s just this underlying sense that the town has been operating according to its own rules for a very long time, and I’m the one who showed up without knowing any of them. Even when nothing especially disturbing was happening, I still found myself wondering what I was going to stumble across next. It’s quite literally the recipe for a bad dream.
Welcome to Elderfield Has a Lot More Going On Than Farming
As strange as Elderfield is, though, there is still a fairly traditional farming sim underneath all of it. The farm itself works about how I expected it to at first, as I can till the soil before planting crops and then water them as they grow. Of course, this being Welcome to Elderfield, it doesn’t take long for that side of the game to get weird either, because some of the things I can eventually grow include teeth and eyeballs. There are also tentacles that can show up around the farm, so even one of the game’s most Stardew Valley-like elements doesn’t get to stay normal for very long.
Guess the games from the emojis.
Guess the games from the emojis.
Easy (120s)Medium (90s)Hard (60s)
The Stardew Valley similarities continue once I start getting to know the people who live in town. Talking to villagers improves my relationship with them over time, and I can give them gifts to help with that as well. Some of those relationships can eventually become romantic in the full game, with marriage also being possible, so there is clearly a much larger social side to Welcome to Elderfield than what I was able to see in the demo.
More importantly, for my time with it, talking to everyone also gave me plenty to do around Elderfield. Different villagers would tell me what they needed and then send me off to take care of it, and those requests generally revolved around whatever else I was already doing in the game. Farmer Hans, for instance, gave me requests involving the farm, while Molly had me looking for materials in the mines. Other quests took me somewhere completely different, which is how I eventually ended up heading into the mall to take care of a creature called a Shopper for one of the kids in town.
Welcome to Elderfield Turns Its Mall Into a Full-Blown RPG Dungeon
And speaking of the mall, that’s where Welcome to Elderfield started showing me how much further it was willing to go beyond the usual farming sim formula. The mall essentially functions as a dungeon in the demo, and once I started making my way through it, I was suddenly dealing with turn-based combat rather than simply spending another day around town (though the tutorial at the beginning of the demo had me to do a turn-based battle to learn the mechanics). Battles use action points, which determine how much I can do during my turn, so there’s at least some strategy involved in deciding how I want to approach each encounter.
The RPG systems surrounding combat make some of the things I do outside of battle more important as well. Food, for example, can provide buffs that help during combat, so cooking has a practical use beyond being another activity I can spend time on. Equipment also matters once I’m heading somewhere dangerous, which means exploring Elderfield and gathering what I need along the way can directly affect how prepared I am when a fight starts.
As strange as Elderfield is, though, there is still a fairly traditional farming sim underneath all of it.
And that’s undoubtedly the biggest difference between Welcome to Elderfield and something like Stardew Valley. There are obviously plenty of familiar ideas here, especially around the farm and the relationships I can build with people in town, but the RPG side gives me a different form of progression to pursue. I might start out doing something completely ordinary and then eventually find myself in a turn-based battle against something that absolutely does not belong in a farming sim, and after everything else I saw in Elderfield, that somehow stopped feeling unusual.
I Didn’t Want Welcome to Elderfield’s Demo to End
By the time the Welcome to Elderfield demo ended, it felt like I had only just gotten past the point where the game was introducing itself to me. I understood the basic routine by then, but I was also beginning to see how much more there was to it once the RPG side started opening up. That’s what made the ending so frustrating, because I wasn’t ready to stop. If anything, I felt like the demo had finally reached the point where I wanted to start digging deeper into everything it had spent the previous few hours setting up.
That’s also why I’m curious to see how all of this holds up across the full game. Welcome to Elderfield is already doing enough differently to separate itself from the countless other farming sims on Steam, but a demo only has so much room to show how far those ideas can actually go. The turn-based combat, in particular, has plenty of room to become more involved once better equipment and tougher enemies enter the picture, and I’m interested to see whether the rest of the game continues finding ways to push its farming sim foundation in unexpected directions.
Still, the fact that I was disappointed when the demo ended probably says more than anything else I could about my time with it. I went into Welcome to Elderfield mostly curious about its strange combination of genres, but I came out of the demo wishing I could have kept playing. Thankfully, with the full release right around the corner, I won’t have to wonder about the rest of Elderfield for much longer.
- Developer(s)
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Chris Cote
- Publisher(s)
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Ill-Advised Games
- Engine
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RPGMaker
