Turns out that farming is a pretty compelling addition to the horde survival roguelite formula

The horde survival genre grows weekly and a recent entrant is Pesticide Not Required, which tosses in familiar tropes from the ever-popular farm and life sim genres: Don't craft or pick up your weapons, grow them instead. Defeat enemies for money, then buy seeds, plant crops, and harvest them for experience—or go mining and fishing, like you do.

Rather than each wave coming continuously in genre-standard Vampire Survivors fashion, Pesticide Not Included has each day and subsequent night spent avoiding and battling the oncoming horde. Survive that and you get a moment where the clock stops and the nearby Merch-ant opens shop for you to buy new weapon and crop seeds, expand your farming area, and even get pets like dogs, cats, elephants, toucans, capybaras, etc. to help you do farm tasks.

Pesticide Not Required has one of those trendy free Prologue versions out on Steam, and it's pretty fun to tool around with and see where the developers are going with the game. It has extra characters to unlock alongside a bunch of weapons, upgrades, and crops to make—though the developers (and in-game icons) are quite clear it's not all of them. You can try that free demo on Steam.

It's pretty genre-standard gameplay with the kind of normal twists you'd expect, having you use a combination of weapon choices and upgrades to craft an invincible build that'll help you survive the waves. The real twist, and it's a decently compelling one, is how you're forced into various kinds of movement while you play. You have to move much more than is normal for the genre so you can water your crops or catch fish, emphasizing the genre staple of learning how and where your weapons attack.

By far the funniest part, however, is that when your frog survives a whole season it goes Wumbo mode, grows to fill the entire screen, and then you trample every remaining bug into goop.

Pesticide Not Included is the first game from Jampacked Games, an indie studio based in Toronto, Canada. They're also working on Avanzar, a movement-based FPS roguelike looter-shooter.

You can find Pesticide Not Required on Steam, where it's set to release in the first quarter of 2024. You can also find the free demo version on Steam, and you can check out the Jampacked Games website to boot.

Pesticide Not Required

(Image credit: Jampacked Games)

Pesticide Not Required

(Image credit: Jampacked Games)

Pesticide Not Required

(Image credit: Jampacked Games)

Pesticide Not Required

(Image credit: Jampacked Games)
Contributor

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.

Read more
A young witch watering a smiling mushroom in a magic garden
Here's a roguelite dungeon crawler Steam reviewers call 'a botanical Diablo' and 'like Cult of the Lamb' except you manage a mystical garden
A series of large explosions in Bio Prototype.
This bizarre roguelike has a new take on the Vampire Survivors formula: letting you build your own custom weapons out of brains, eyeballs, and chimpanzee spines
A witch looks out from a balcony full of plants
Cozy undead gardening game Greenheart Necromancer is apparently 'a mixture of 'witchcore' and 'whimsigoth' with a healthy dose of 'grandma chic''
A mountain block dropping into place in Drop Duchy.
Drop Duchy is an unholy fusion of city builder, roguelike deckbuilder, and Tetris, and you can try it for free right now
Tiny Garden - A digital spherical capsule toy with a crank that has a small garden inside
Tiny Garden is an adorable Polly Pocket-sized farm sim where you crank a handle to grow crops
A spellcaster and muscular barbarian face down against an army of skeletons.
This 'overwhelmingly positive' Steam Next Fest autobattler demo feels like someone bolted a Path of Exile-style map onto Halls of Torment, and I fear for my future productivity
Latest in Roguelike
A convoy of strange beings proceed across a desert in Caves of Qud key art.
After 17 years, devs of the only roguelike where players ask 'the best way to get the most limbs' can't believe its success: 'More people have bought Caves of Qud than are in this stadium, how do you reckon with that?'
A True Kin knight stands in a ruin in Caves of Qud, flanked by bloodstained furniture and a freshly mortalized corpse.
Despite making a roguelike where you can have countless arms and legs, Caves of Qud's creators say the ideal form is a limbless sphere: 'We started in perfection and only moved farther from God'
The jester from Balatro, portrayed in unsettling detail in real life, wears an uncanny smile and stares at the viewer.
PC Gamer vindicated by Swen Vincke: Larian boss calls Balatro his personal GOTY as it sweeps top prize from devs at GDC awards
live action Jimbo the Jester from Balatro holding a playing card and addressing the camera
Balatro's first demo could be edited with Notepad to unlock the whole game—the solution? 'Bury it as soon as possible' with a 'newer, shinier version'
A busy marketplace in The Bazaar.
The Bazaar could be the future of autobattlers, if it stops strangling itself to death with its own microtransactions
A vampire with a dark castle and swarms of bats in the background.
We need to decide on a genre name for Vampire Survivors-like games before a really terrible one sticks
Latest in News
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened
Junah beginning a battle in Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Today's RPG fans are 'very sensitive to feeling like they wasted time' when they die, says Metaphor: ReFantazio battle planner—but Atlus still made combat hard anyway
Image of Cersei Lanniser from Game of Thrones: Kingsroad Steam early access trailer
A new Game of Thrones RPG is coming to Steam today with a cast of 'familiar faces,' which is good because it's really the only way to tell it's a GoT game at all
The new Prime Asset featured in the upcoming update for the Outlast Trials.
The Outlast Trials puts its already paranoid players under surveillance for a time-limited story event
A Viera looking confused in Final Fantasy 14.
Old armor continues to fall victim to Final Fantasy 14's bizarre two-channel dye system, unless you're super into changing the colour of teeny-tiny eyelets: 'Why even bother at this point?'
Starfield: Shattered Space
By the time Bethesda was on Starfield, you'd 'basically get in trouble' for breaking schedule, says former dev: 'A lot of the great stuff within Skyrim came from having the freedom to do what you want'