Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin asks a lot of a player who just wants to hit something. It hands you a harvest goddess with a temper, a magical sash and a set of farming tools, then makes you grow rice before it lets you fight. That should be a disaster. Instead, Edelweiss has built one of the strangest and most satisfying games of 2020, a hack-and-slash platformer welded to a farming simulator that somehow makes both halves better.
Trailer, via XSEEDgames.
A goddess who destroys a rice garner
Sakuna begins as a spoiled princess in the Mihashira Capital, a life of leisure among the gods and spirits of Yanato. That life ends fast. A band of starving humans — Tauemon the samurai, Myrthe the missionary, Kinta the blacksmith apprentice, Yui the weaver, and a young boy named Kaimaru — cross the floating bridge between the Lofty Realm and the Lowly Realm. They are not supposed to be there.
Sakuna meets them on the bridge, knocks a bandit named Ishimaru off it and into the sea of clouds, then warns the humans to leave. They ignore her and walk into the capital to find food. While feasting with her weapon familiar Tama and her friend Kokorowa, an inventor goddess, Sakuna discovers the intrusion. She tries to stop them and accidentally destroys the capital’s rice garner.
That accident is the whole game. Lady Kamuhitsuki, the head goddess, banishes Sakuna and the humans to Hinoe Island, the Isle of Demons, and charges her with clearing it of demonic beasts. The bridge home has vanished, and even Kamuhitsuki does not know when it will return. Sakuna’s parents once lived on this island. So did the evil god Omizuchi.
Two games that refuse to let go of each other
The structure of Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin is split cleanly in two, and the split is the point. Side-scrolling hack-and-slash levels open up across a map of the island as the player completes objectives. Between those runs, Sakuna returns to a mountain village and grows rice in a small paddy.
The action half uses a 2.5D perspective. Sakuna fights demonic animals with her farming tools and grapples across gaps with a “divine raiment,” a magical sash that extends to great lengths. It is a platformer first and a brawler second, and the grappling is the best thing in it. Zipping onto a distant ledge or yanking a demon toward you never stops feeling good.
The village half runs on a day/night cycle. Enemies grow more powerful and dangerous once night falls. When the day ends, Sakuna sits down to dinner with the humans, eating a meal made from ingredients the player gathered. The meal restores health and stamina, and depending on the dishes served it activates abilities and grants temporary buffs for the next day.
Rice is not a side activity. It takes several in-game seasons, each season three in-game days, and it unfolds as a run of minigames covering tilling, planting and harvesting. The full process runs from planting through harvest, and the quality of the crop feeds directly back into Sakuna’s battle strength.
The humans are not furniture
Most games would park a supporting cast like this in a menu and forget them. Sakuna does not. The humans can be asked to gather resources, preserve ingredients for later, and craft upgraded farming tools and clothing.
That matters because the game keeps insisting Sakuna is responsible for these people. She is a harvest goddess, and the story frames her banishment as a job: secure a foothold for the capital, root out the demons, and look after the wayward children of men who got her into this.
- Tauemon, a samurai
- Myrthe, a missionary
- Kinta, a blacksmith apprentice
- Yui, a young girl skilled at weaving
- Kaimaru, a young boy
None of them asked to be on Hinoe Island. Neither did Sakuna, but she is the one with the sash and the scythe.
Ashigumo and the mountain pass
The group arrives on the island by boat and meets Ashigumo, a weasel-like samurai and the last of his kind. He knew Sakuna’s parents. He also reveals that Tama once belonged to Sakuna’s father, Lord Takeribi, the warrior god. Her mother is Lady Toyohana, the harvest goddess.
Ashigumo leads them to a mountain pass, where a farm waits. That farm becomes the base of operations. It is where the rice grows, where the tools get upgraded, and where the humans slowly turn from a burden into a household.
The setup is doing quiet work here. Sakuna’s parents are a warrior god and a harvest goddess. Sakuna is both, whether she likes it or not, and the game’s two halves are not a gimmick. They are her inheritance split down the middle.
Where the harvest and the ruin collide
The reason Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin holds together is that the farming is not a rest between fights. It is the reason the fights get easier. Better rice means a stronger Sakuna, and a stronger Sakuna means deeper runs into the Isle of Demons.
That loop gives the rice minigames real weight. Tilling a field is tedious in a vacuum. Tilling a field when you know the harvest will decide whether you can survive the next night is not. The game makes you care about a crop, which is a harder trick than it sounds.
The day/night cycle reinforces it. The dark is a threat, not a mood. The enemies get tougher, and the dinner table becomes a strategic decision rather than a cutscene. Choosing what to cook is choosing how to fight tomorrow.
The seams show
Not everything lands. The side-scrolling levels are the weaker half. The 2.5D perspective keeps the action readable, but the level design leans on the same grapple-and-slash rhythm for long stretches, and the map opens up gradually enough that backtracking becomes a chore.
The rice process is deep, and depth is not the same as clarity. The minigames stack up across seasons, and the game is stingy about explaining which steps actually move the numbers. Players who want to optimize will spend a lot of time guessing.
The story is also thinner than its premise. Sakuna’s arc from spoiled princess to true successor is stated more often than it is dramatized. The humans have names and roles, but most of them stay close to those roles. Kokorowa, the inventor goddess and Sakuna’s friend, is the most interesting figure in the cast and the one the game uses least.
What the rice buys you
Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin is a game that should not work. A harvest goddess fighting demons with hoes and sickles, stopping every few days to plant a paddy, sounds like two games stapled together by someone who lost a bet. Edelweiss made the staple the whole point.
The farming is not padding. It is the progression system, the pacing, and the emotional core. The combat is not filler. It is what the rice buys you. When the two halves click, Sakuna does something almost no other game in 2020 attempted.
It is not a clean game. The platforming wears thin, the systems resist explanation, and the story never quite matches the ambition of its structure. But the structure is the achievement. Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin takes a spoiled goddess, a bag of rice and a group of starving humans, and turns them into a loop that is genuinely hard to put down.
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