The Outback is a truly beautiful and terrifying place, even in cute little cartoon form.
Dinkum is an open-world farming and crafting game set in a uniquely Australian-themed environment. Though slow to start, the game quickly impresses with its depth of possibilities and long-term, committed progression. You can play entirely your own way, and there’s more than enough to keep you engaged for a very long time. However, some enforced wait times might make it harder for some players to stay fully invested over the long haul.
Dinkum begins with a brief but telling story about how the world “went south”—literally, as in people moved south (presumably from Australia) into the freezing cold to escape some kind of catastrophe. Things are looking up now, and you’re one of the few brave souls willing to leave the southern cities and head north to explore the warm, Outback-inspired island of Dinkum, or whatever it is you end up naming it in your own playthrough.
It doesn’t take long to realize which games inspired Dinkum. The most obvious one is Animal Crossing. The core mechanics and art direction seem directly inspired by it, and anyone familiar with those games will adapt to Dinkum’s systems quickly.
Dinkum leans harder into the living-off-the-land angle, more in line with other farming sims like Stardew Valley. If you see it in the game, there’s a good chance you can chop it down, mine it, dig it up, or kill it.
That’s right, one major difference from similar titles is the inclusion of hunting and animal combat. I’m not highlighting this as a moral stance, but because it’s interesting. Raptors, crocodiles, and other hostile wildlife are part of the world and will attack if you get too close. Far beyond simply fishing, you’ll need to take up spears and other weapons to hunt wildlife, either to defend yourself or collect meat. It’s funny how a game so heavily inspired by the Australian Outback also included the absolute insane danger of the local wildlife; I guess Dinkum wouldn’t be true to form without it.
The gameplay loop is pretty simple at first, everything you do on the island, be it logging, mining, fishing, or farming, produces some kind of resource, often ones that can then be further refined. Whether you’re selling something you built with your bare hands or something you just found, the idea is essentially to take what you need and sell what you don’t, earning as many Dinkums as you can from the fruits of your labor. The game does a great job of not railroading you into any one path, either; you can essentially do whatever you want, however long you want, so long as it eventually turns a profit. There are, of course, some exceptions, as you need a few specific refined materials to progress, but gathering and refining them doesn’t have to be a full-time job.
This second form of progression is where the game gets more complicated. In Dinkum, your overarching goal, though you can ignore it if you’d like, is twofold: first, to unlock licenses used to further cultivate your island, and second, to permanently settle the island with the game’s 16 NPCs.
The first form of progression, being license acquisition, is both an interesting way to gate progress. To do essentially anything in Dinkum, you need a corresponding license to do it. A hunting license to hunt, a fishing license to fish, a mining license to mine, etc. you may’t even buy certain tools required to do actions without these licenses, which you earn by getting “permit points” through the game’s version of achievements. Since you don’t technically have to do most of the game’s forms of cultivation if you don’t want to, it’s a really interesting and somewhat optional progression system I enjoyed.
Getting visitors to move to your island is a more involved process, one that requires you to both befriend a visiting NPC, convince them to move in, and then build them a house, something that is expensive in both labor and money. The idea is that you’ll go from a lone tent-dweller to someone running a full community, with paved roads and farming vehicles—if that’s the direction you want to take it, with everything built by your own hands.
The subjective problem with this is that it will take you such a long time to do it. Building my first structure and acquiring my first town member took me about two hours of gameplay, and made me 75,000 Dinkums in debt. That debt took quite a bit of logging and metal detecting to pay off. Fully completing your little township takes serious commitment. Some people will love that. Others will get tired partway through.
The game could be a little better about this, with some areas being a bit artificially time-consuming, in my opinion. Refining ore, for example, is a process that takes a few minutes (or in-game hours) and can only be done one bit at a time. A lot of refining requires you to work one piece at a time, rather than producing stacks or multiples to make the process easier and more time-efficient. You also have to wait full in-game days for buildings to be complete, jobs to change, or for NPCs to return to your island, or even for the shop to reopen if it’s a Sunday. Again, you’re either going to love this time mechanic for its realism and required commitment to the game, or you’re going to get tired of dealing with it. I was more towards the latter, but I could see the appeal.
The Final Word
Dinkum is a fun twist on its genre, offering a unique feeling of progression and open-world gameplay in a setting inspired by the Australian Outback. You’re either going to love the game for the long-term commitment it demands or grow a bit tired of its slow pacing. Either way, I think the game is worth giving a shot.
TryHardGuides was provided a PC review code for Dinkum. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on ourGame Reviewspage! Dinkum is available onSteam.
