VR Gaming: Across the Valley Farming Sim
Posted on January 21, 2026 by Aywren
The first VR game that I tried out this year was a farming simulator called Across the Valley. I got this on sale when it was only 99 cents, and was excited to try out what a farming simulator experience could be in VR.
The normal cost of this game is $14.99 on Meta and $19.99 on Steam. I’d have been a bit miffed if I’d paid full price for it at that rate. But at 99 cents, I can’t really complain too much.
No Walking Allowed
The first thing that jumped out at me that somewhat dampened my excitement was this game doesn’t allow for walking in the virtual space. It’s full teleportation points only. I’d hoped that I’d be able to walk through my fields, barn, farm house, even if it was a small area to explore – I didn’t expect much.
Instead, there are fixed teleportation spots that you hop around to. The positive of this is that you get where you need to go quickly, and it also makes it so there’s little to no chance of getting that motion sickness feeling you get from some VR games.
The negative is that it completely restricts the ability to engage with the virtual farm. Not to mention if you accidentally click out of the UI or object you’re interacting with, you can find yourself teleported to a spot you didn’t intend to move to. This happened a lot to me when I was trying to purchase something from the catalogue near the transport cart. I’d miss-click and find myself standing somewhere completely different.
The developers apparently consider this a feature, calling it “Action Point Locomotion System.” I wish I’d known what that meant before I bought this game. But again, for 99 cents, it’s a small thing to grouch about.
No Tutorial
Another thing to keep in mind, especially for beginners, is there’s no tutorial on how to use the hand controls in this game. It relies on you to have experienced using grip buttons and interactions in other games to understand how to play.
While this was fine for me, as I’ve played games that taught me these foundational things, it still took a moment for me to remember them as I’ve not picked up a VR game in a few months. For a brand new player, I really think a very short optional tutorial would have been helpful.
Some of the mini games suffer from the lack of a tutorial as well. The hoeing game, for example, didn’t make it specifically clear that you needed to line up your hoe with weeds in a straight line to eliminate as many as possible for each stroke. It also didn’t warn you that you only get so many tries before the game tallies up how well you did, and that you can actually lose seedlings if you don’t clean out all of the weeds. Very quickly, hoeing became my least favorite chore in the game.
Instead, the game provides tasks for you to achieve, which are stuck on a calendar-like object inside the farm house. This did provide some guidance and tips in a round-about way, but nothing about how to use basic controls or complete the important mini-games that can directly affect your harvest.
Gameplay Loop
The overall gameplay loop is what you’d expect. There’s a day and night cycle, and you need to take care of all of the stuff on your farm while it’s still daytime.
As you check off items on the task board, the game unlocks more elements for you to explore. First, you start with one field and learn how to plant it. After you successfully sell some produce, you can unlock your first chicken. And so on.
There were some rather zen moments within the game in terms of the VR controls. I specifically enjoyed sowing the seeds in the garden plots. It felt a lot like exactly what seed sowing should feel – tossing seeds as evenly as possible from a basket in your hand.
I also enjoyed petting the farm animals, pumping the hand well, and getting the daily egg from the chicken coop. Experiences like that were what I was looking for when I bought this game, and these were quite satisfying overall.
However, I do wonder how taxing the gameplay loop might become once you start to amass a larger number of livestock and farming plots. There’s no way to automate things as far as I can tell in this game – that seems to defeat the purpose of it, after all.
You can also buy and upgrade things for your farm from the planning table within the farm house. This includes decorations for the farm house itself. However, this is very limited in that the game just adds the decorations to your house and there’s no customization in any sense.
Actually, my takeaway for this game is just that. It’s a very on-rails VR experience with next to no customization. If all you want to do is go through the motions of keeping a farm in a VR environment, this game may scratch that itch. Just don’t pay full price for it and don’t expect an immersive experience as there’s no way to explore or walk around your own farm.
But hey, you can pet the animals. That counts for something, right?
