The cozy farming-sim space is getting crowded—and now Dragon Shelter wants to squeeze in too. Its helpful little dragon companions make a strong case, but the preview build also left me with a few worries.

Story of Seasons, Coral Island, My Time at Sandrock, Grow: Song of the Evertree: at this point, the farming-sim genre feels a bit like the Tokyo subway at rush hour. It’s packed, another train comes roaring in every two or three minutes, and at first glance, one looks much like the next.

If developers want to cut through all that noise, they need a pretty convincing hook. In Stardew Valley, that hook was a whole wonderland of systems held together by narrative glue. In Dragon Shelter, it’s a cleverly placed boost to the fun factor. Because this one has fluffy dragons—and they’re genuinely useful fluffy dragons. These mythical little workhorses are highly motivated and more than happy to help out around the farm.

But ever since the farming-sim throne stopped belonging to Story of Seasons by default, expectations for the genre have shot up. Does Dragon Shelter offer enough fascination and enough to do to hold its own in such a crowded field? I took a closer look at preview build 0.0.36.7 and spent more than 10 hours poking at it.

Thanks for the ruined farm, Grandpa

A lot of life sims with farming elements use dear old Grandpa as the excuse for why the player suddenly owns a half-wrecked farm. Honestly, why can’t the old coots leave us something that isn’t falling apart for once? 😉 Anyway, Dragon Shelter keeps that proud grandpa tradition alive.

Before it drops you into the mandatory wilderness with your tiny farmhouse, though, your character goes through a basic character creator with around ten presets per body area. There are no genders. After that, there’s a short intro made from supposedly hand-painted animated artwork, though it doesn’t reveal all that much about the setup. At the start, all you really know is this:

1. This is Grandpa’s ruined farm
2. Something is bubbling in the pond next to the house
3. The nearby town is also ready for demolition, and everyone there is in a terrible mood.

An entire town stuck in a slump

You can see that gloomy mood, too. Early on, the townspeople are hanging their heads—actually, their whole upper bodies—so low they might as well be folding in half. It sounds funny, it looks funny, but it also sends an important message: for once, Dragon Shelter doesn’t begin with everything all sunshine and rainbows. That doesn’t mean the game starts off heavy, though. The painterly cuddle-core look and lovely music, which always hits the right note, make sure of that. And once a dragon gets involved, the usual genre party mood kicks in anyway.

Either way, you can forget about a warm welcome. First, you’ll need to earn the trust of these grumps. The preview version only shows a little of its trust and friendship systems, though. During my hands-on session, dialogue stayed very basic; aside from discovering the dragons, I didn’t experience any major events or special moments. Mostly it was: bake me a water cake, bring me nails, try my seeds, fix the streetlights, and so on.

If Dragon Shelter does have a strong narrative side waiting in the wings, I’d like to see it kick in earlier in the final version. That feels important to me because, in the preview, I barely cared about the NPCs. They came across as funny-looking contrast characters who hand out tasks—nothing more, nothing less. I was missing the kind of standout personality traits that would make me want to build relationships with them.

Of course, all of that could still come later, and I really hope it does. Because when it comes to the actual play, Dragon Shelter has some real strengths, and I’ll get into those now.

"Make us happy while we keep moping around"

If you’ve ever played a farming sim before, you know what comes next: your job is to help this run-down little town breathe easy again. In other words, everything needs to look nice again, and every single NPC needs to be practically bubbling over with joy. To make that happen, you gather resources, repair houses and streetlights with tools, complete tasks, and clear weeds and rocks from the roads. Meanwhile, the townsfolk continue standing around looking miserable, though some of them do hand you useful items.

Despite your noble mission, you’ll spend most of your time on your own small patch of land. There, you grow vegetables or plants, cook, chop down trees with an axe for wood, smash rocks with a pickaxe, collect fireflies for lanterns, raise animals, and renovate or decorate your house. The seemingly mandatory ore mine is apparently absent—and in the preview, the game world seems to consist only of the farmland and the fairly compact town.

Some mechanics are a little more involved, of course. Before you can grow anything, you first need to pull out a shovel and "cut out" square farming plots. Then you plant the seeds you bought from the gardener, and finally you pour water onto each individual plot with your watering can. Standard stuff. But once you discover that the bubbling in the farm pond is coming from a water dragon, that’s when the fun really starts.

Elemental little helpers

The dragon turns out to be a friendly helper for just about every job. Chopping trees? Watering crops? Cooking? The dragon joins in as soon as it has the right tools. It’s actually pretty smart about it, too, especially when cooking—but more on that in a moment.

Later, you also find a fire dragon that feeds on coal and makes the daily routine even more interesting. You can even put both scaly buddies on a leash and take them for a walk if you want. You should treat them well, though: the occasional petting, feeding, and play session is basically mandatory. It’s also fun. After all, merchants don’t just sell tools, resources, and workstations; they sell toys too.

Those include a trampoline and a ball, both of which lead to some wonderfully odd scenes in practice. The dragons even head to the trampoline on their own to fill their fun meters. Playing ball, meanwhile, only starts once you kick the ball to a dragon. After that, it gets knocked back and forth, sadly with some extremely basic "ball physics." So the activity itself is only moderately fun, but visually? It absolutely slays.

Cooking is great when you’ve got a dragon

Cooking is one of the game’s central mechanics, but wait—don’t run away. In Dragon Shelter, you don’t just stand at a stove, toss ingredients into a pot out of sheer boredom, and instantly get a result. Instead, you buy lots of "workstations" from the merchant, such as storage baskets, a stone oven, sugar and water barrels, a large rotary mill, a stove, worktops, and so on, then place them outside the house on a foundation.

Before you start cooking, you need to put certain ingredient supplies into the storage baskets, because cooking is a slightly separate minigame. In other words, once you’re cooking, you can’t place new objects or refill supplies. To begin, you pick one of the recipes you’ve unlocked through progress from a nearby noticeboard, and off you go. Now you run back and forth between the stations according to the instructions shown at the top of the screen. For the jam recipe, it looks like this:

• Take berries from the storage basket
• Grind the berries in the rotary mill
• Get sugar and water from the barrels, then put both into a pot
• Add the berry mash to the pot
• Light firewood in the stove with matches (kept separately on a counter)
• Take a jar from the jar basket, fill it with jam
• Place the full jar on the serving stand
• Pick up the jar from a small delivery cart—done

On your own, all the baking and simmering is already interesting enough, but with a dragon at your side, it becomes properly fun. That’s because the water- or fire-breathing reptiles always keep track of what you’re doing and then handle the next step. It doesn’t matter whether you follow the recipe rigidly or decide, "Eh, I don’t feel like chopping, sugaring, and adding water right now. I’ll just throw some firewood into the oven first." The dragon always does the right thing.

At first, I found the cooking system a little confusing because the instructions speak in small pictures and symbols. Sometimes I could immediately tell what the next action was, sometimes not. Still, I think the visual language works really well and makes a lot of sense, because after a short adjustment period, it’s actually the fastest way to follow along. I had an absolute blast in the outdoor kitchen, thanks to the dragons and the workstation setup. And the fact that the dragons also wear chef’s hats is, well... the cherry on top.

Verdict: Huge potential, but still plenty to prove

With its dragon helpers, Dragon Shelter lands a direct hit—and that alone helps it stand apart from plenty of other farming sims. In the preview, I still ran into smaller bugs, such as one dragon’s fun meter suddenly refusing to fill completely, or a dragon failing to find its way onto the trampoline. I also missed a few quality-of-life features, like being able to reassign quick slots via drag and drop.

Other things worry me more, though. Will the game world grow before release? How extensive will animal breeding be? Will town festivals offer more than NPCs throwing confetti and hopping around in circles? Will the characters remain this flat? At least a certain bard stood out a little during my session, but for my taste, the game still needs more on that front.

Either way, I’m curious to see how much the final version differs from the preview build I played. The developers at Wild Forest Studio still have some time to tinker with Dragon Shelter—the game is scheduled to launch on September 24.

Alex Nitschke

I’ve been into video games since 1982, spending 12 of those years in professional games journalism. I’ve also been developing games since the early ’90s, starting with a humble C64. Outside of code and keyboards, I’ve been a musician since 1989. Man, I have no idea how I can still be alive...

Website · Bluesky