Professional Farmer 2014 Is A Game, And Has A Demo

I don't know what's a joke any more. When people are championing Euro Truck Simulator as a genuinely good game, it's made everything far too confusing. Is it really? I've not played it. The slew of ludicrously meticulous mundanity sims with italicised white lettering was something I thought we could just poke fun at. But now what? Professional Farmer 2014 is a thing. That's the name of a game. I feel like I should be safe to tip my head back and laugh. But I'm not, am I? What if it's brilliant? What if cats ARE dogs? Well, there's a demo so we can all find out.

What are the latest farming techniques for 2014?

Just the demo for this farming simulator is 2.6GB, but let's take a look.

A loading screen... nothing else... clicking doesn't do anything... Escape? Oh, no, that takes itself literally and I'm back to desktop. Let's try again.

Ooh, this time it's remembered to load the buttons. So, profile created, selected, then selected once more, and I'm in.

This game has three types of animals, I'm told. Chickens, ducks and cows. And this game also doesn't take kindly to task switching. Let's just launch it again.

Once I'd been shown around my farm, I was then given my first task! Plough a field.

Plough a field?

No.

No I won't plough a field. Oh my goodness, this isn't entertainment! This is work! I HATE work!

I have this weird thing, this weird irrational fear, when I drive past a farm and I think to myself, "Oh God, I don't want to have to work on a farm, I don't want it to be my turn to work on a farm," before I realise that it's relatively unlikely that this will occur. I really do this. (I do it for building sites too, where I panic about when it's my turn to have to carry so many heavy things and work so hard doing difficult manual labour.) This game is like that nightmare coming true for me, willingly creating the job I fear within the job I love. What madness is this?

Ploughing a field takes AGES, and tractors go REALLY SLOWLY. And apparently this isn't the approved method:

So in summary: what? This might be amazing, according to the new laws of physics that now seemingly apply. It features first-person on foot sections, where you can run and jump about your farmyard, mocking the penned in chickens with your abundant freedom. It's also a simulation of farming, and not a simulation of flying a spaceship into the Sun, then parachuting back to Earth, which it could have been.

You can buy Professional Farmer 2014 for £15 right now.