I never quite know what to do with casual games. I want to optimise and run my happy little place into the ground like I do with all the management games I play, but that’s not the point of these games. The point is to quietly build something relaxing.

I don’t know how to do any of the things in that sentence. I only know ambition and destruction.

Or maybe there is space for ambition and destruction…

Cheeky Chooks is a casual farm management game. You run an ethical chicken farm, and rather than being focused on exploiting as much money as possible from the chickens, your goal is to build a chicken paradise. I’d argue that making money is a secondary goal, if it’s even a goal at all. The goal is to create a happy home for as many chickens as possible. They get food, water, coops, toys, everything that their little chicken hearts could desire. The player’s role is simply to provide, and to sell eggs when they have too many.

It is, then, a recreation not of a chicken farm, per se, but of the experience of having back yard chickens.

This is Banshee, and he’s helping with this review.

I happen to have had backyard chickens, and loved having them. As I played Cheeky Chooks, I was reminded of the experience of having chickens. Backyard chickens are not profitable. They aren’t a fantastic exercise in the power of entrepreneurship. They eat money, destroy their home, and delight in chaos.

I love them.

I don’t think Cheeky Chooks is particularly good as a game. Its gameplay loop is repetitive and unengaging, and there’s no real incentive to keep playing once you’ve spent more than an hour or so on a particular playthrough. The chickens interact the objects, but by and large, much of the gameplay is just watching chickens drift around a space, bouncing off one another, pecking at things, and just being chickens. There is no grand economic strategy to be gained here, nor are the buildings so uniquely designed that I’d argue anything uniquely beautiful can be created. This is a game about chickens doing chicken things.

And again, it’s wonderful.

This is my favourite picture of my hens, Starscream, Josephine, and Min.

Chickens are not critters that feel a compelling need to exist for an audience’s benefit, though if you spend any amount of time watching them - and I have spent a significant amount of time watching them - you’ll realise they don’t have to. They are curious and sociable creatures who spend most of their day exploring, chatting with one another, and being up to something. As a group and casually observed, the intricacies of their interactions are missed, but when you take the time to truly watch them, you notice how complex their lives are, and unique each one is.

Cheeky Chooks obviously isn’t capable of creating entirely alive chickens. The chickens in the game have little paths they meander along and interactions that actual chickens don’t have. There’s an attention to detail in Cheeky Chooks, though, that I admire. The game takes the time, for example, to animate chickens sunning themselves in the ridiculous poses. It captures the madness of having three available coops, but all the hens fighting over one spot. In its details, it does its best to capture some of the small things that make backyard chickens so much fun, and in doing so, it becomes a deeply endearing game. It captures the desire people who keep these sorts of chickens have to see them as little characters for whom they are building an idyllic and safe world, and recreates that experience. It creates chickens as beings rather than as objects, and their happiness as the goal rather than any particular financial or even human-centric goal.

100% authentic chicken experience

To be clear, I don’t think Cheeky Chooks is necessarily a good game. Its gameplay is repetitive and dull, and there isn’t enough variety to really make any of its achievements feel worth completing. However, I still enjoy it, less for what it is, and more for what it manages to capture. Cheeky Chooks, in a weird way, captures the experience of staring out my window at my chickens, and just delighting in this little beings wandering my yard. It captures the essence of chickens and what makes them delightful, and in doing so, perhaps introduces the idea that they are beings of worth to those who hadn’t previously considered that possibility.

It’s not a good game, but it is a good experience, and I appreciate it for that.

Developer: Trilum Studios

Genre: Casual

Year: 2018

Country: Australia

Language: English

Play Time: Buk Buk?

Youtube: https://youtu.be/vpfVPCrg_EA