Latin cowboy casual farming sim Gaucho and the Grassland new demo released

​Gaucho and the Grassland is a game that depicts the life of a Gaúcho, the equivalent of a Latin Cowboy from the region of the Pampas (South of Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile).

The full game is set to be released in Feb 2025, and this is the official trailer:

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The Grassland is a place that not only brings you adventures related to daily duties like taking care of the cattle, helping locals, harvesting and resource gathering much like Stardew Valley, but also has some folkloric elements like "Boitatá the fire snake" which corrupts environments as it passes and the "Velho Pai (Old Father)", an Elderly Gaúcho that helps you with general guidance throughout the game.

The demo provided back at the end of 2022 was not that great. Controllers were bad, camera was awkward, mounting the horse was not really enjoyable because the map was tiny, the dog digging items mechanic was awful. However, after playing 3 hours in a chilled exploring mode in the brand new demo, these are my impressions so far:

The Good

• Game is more polite with more textures, a better night and day cycle, dynamically moving NPCs, item trading with NPCs, and there is actually an earth curvature while you explore the island.
• A significant amount of content was added if compared with the old demo.
• There is kind of a tutorial which is gameplay driven that let's you freely explore the map while learning the game mechanics.
• I've played in Portuguese and English and I think the linguistic regionalism that is a characteristic of the Pampas is well translated or good equivalents are being used for the written dialogs.
• For those born in the Rio Grande do Sul state like me (Gaúcho), there are plenty of cultural references like when you complete a quest and a sample of the "Canto Alegretense" song is played, which is culturally relevant and an informal anthem of that state.
• Quest system looks fun, and while there is a main quest that bounds all the situations that the NPCs are facing, the side quests help you to understand the mechanics and provide you with new items or recipes. The fact of not having all recipes available and you need to do good deeds to other NPCs to unlock them is cool.
• Controllers are really good movement wise and using keyboard + mouse or my 8BitDo as a Steam managed controller worked out of the box except in specific situations (see below).
• The Dog mechanic got way better since now the spots where the dog needs to dig are visible, making it easier to spot where you can collect materials instead of relying solely on the game RNG.
• The house building and house decoration mechanics are nice and trigger a comfy feeling.
• Game has a lot of potential from exploring, collecting, crafting, house building, decoration and puzzle solving.

The Bad

• The game still needs some optimization. When you start to move around on the map FPS can decrease drastically. In my case with a RTX3070 (laptop) I saw going from 144 to 68, and eventually a dip to 40 FPS.
• The game does not have an autosave feature, which is unusual for this kind of exploration game. What happened is that when I was returning some items to end a quest, the NPC was floating(picture below). When I tried to report a bug by pressing F1 the game completely crashed.
• When entering build mode to create my first house on the first acquired piece of land, I had to use the mouse to first select the item. After that, I was able to navigate through the building process but it seems that right after you enter build mode, the left thumbstick is useless and the first interaction needs to be done with the mouse. For those using controllers only or movement impaired players with special gamepad setup this could be a problem.
• Menus are awkward to navigate with a controller and the game does not have have a HUD scale setting.
• Inventory and crafting uses the same overlay of the main menu, which kinda leads you to the same screen overall if you press Start or Y but on a different tab. On crafting games, I'd expect that you can still observe your environment while crafting and organising your inventory.
• Quest tracking only shows one quest per time, and you need to go all over through menus to change the quest you want to track.
• Playing on keyboard + mouse is good but the default controller layout needs to be worked a little bit. I’ve got confused many times because LB is “call the dog” and RB is “call the horse” when usually in these games genre it is used for item access on your belt. When I wanted to switch items(which are mapped to Dpad R and Dpad L) I got myself calling my dog or horse.

The Ugly (depends on your opinion)

• The expressions used by the main character when doing routine stuff are typically gaúcho regionalisms. While those phrases are catchy for those who understand, may annoy "non south Brazilians" because of the repetition. IMHO, it is stereotypically accurate and non-offensive for those from that region, and I feel like using "Texan accent" audio as a substitution because of the cowboy-ish theme would be bad.
• The game received some Rio Grande do Sul state government subsidy and funding since it portrays the life of the ones who are cowboys in the countryside. This item is on this section because people's opinions can differ much on this matter.
• There is no mini-game for fishing which turns it into a boring task if compared with similar game titles. Fishing animation takes a lot of time making it not enjoyable for those who want to grind materials as well, and fells really slow if compared with other gathering mechanics.
• While the day and night cycle mechanic is good, the day cycle could be longer proportionately in minutes since during the night most of the NPCs are unreachable.
• The previous demo didn’t have a progression system for your actions, and after chopping some wood I noticed that my “Axe Skill” increased by 1, leading to an extra drop rate. After that, the same happened for mining and I don’t know if keeping this progression hidden is by design but, it would be nice to see some progression bars like Valheim.
• The Linux demo build is still the one from 2022. I was scratching my head because the old grass bug was still there, and nothing had changed. When I forced the use of Proton for that title, the new demo was provided. I don’t think it is that bad not providing a Native Linux build, but shaders being compiled during the gameplay could be the cause of performance dips although I saw some Brazilian YouTubers playing natively on Windows having those same performance issues.

Now, some screenshots I took during my gameplay yesterday:

A reference to the Ruins of São Miguel Unesco World Heritage site.

Night cycle is pretty

Fishing is a task that is boring because there is no mini-game, and you need to wait the fishing miss animation to end

The bug that crashed my game and made me lose 20 minutes of progress

The game has incredible potential, if the issues get solved and also because of the fact that you are on an island and navigating out of it could lead to some future DLCs or extra content. I’m giving the benefit of doubt here since other titles of this genre suffered from the same performance issues and got better after some updates.

I tried to be as neutral as possible on my opinions even being a Gaúcho myself.

For those interested, you can follow on Steam and download the demo.

Make sure to force the use of the Steam Play Proton compatibility tool as highlighted above, as the Native Linux demo is old. I've let the developer know about this. It has Linux in the system requirements, so as far as we know the main release will have Linux support.