Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator (PS5)

The phrase “winemaking simulator” conjures images of being out in the vineyard picking grapes, crushing them beneath your feet, or being present at the wine-tasting with the fruits of your labors. However, this really isn’t the kind of life someone who owns a winery can expect to live. They have employees and automated equipment to handle much of that work, so running a winery can end up being more about business decisions and scheduling than labor. Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator choosing to go with the broader management aspects rather than the immersive old-fashioned work of the profession is more an adjustment of expectations than a condemnation of its concept though, a business management game having room for interesting strategy and rich complexity. Unfortunately, while the game can seem incredibly faithful in the ways it represents wine creation, it might also trend too close to realism in how stagnant the work can become.

Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator does at least conceptualize how you manage your vineyards and winery in an interesting way. In this turn-based management simulator, the broader important tasks all must be placed on a grid represented by an open field on your wine-making property. Each task has a specific shape and takes up a certain amount of squares on the grid, this essentially a way of representing how demanding the task is by way of a video game mechanic. Each task also takes a set amount of turns to complete, so even if you can squeeze all your tasks into the field at once, you may have more you need to do on your next turns but the previous ones may still need time to resolve. Starting out it is incredibly easy to fit everything you need on the board, tasks like planting, harvesting, bottling, and wine tasting making a pretty consistent loop for every wine you’ll end up making. As you invest in more fields and thus can produce more wines at once though, the board can become more cramped, and other considerations like cleaning your equipment are necessary to avoid tainting the wine. This should be where complexity and greater player choice in the strategic direction kick in, but there are many factors that hold Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator back from going in that expected direction.

The first is just how long a typical wine takes to make. The game progresses in terms of turns but does go through the regular set of seasons as if you were doing your work over the course of a year. Every step of the wine-making process is pretty set in stone though. Certain grapes may have you ferment them before you press them while others swap those two steps, but otherwise it’s pretty consistent which tasks are needed to make any wine and at the same time, the other demands don’t require much time investment either. After buying some early grid size upgrades, you can comfortably have two wines in production at once while managing things like cleaning, spraying fields to prevent diseases, and even the occasional upgrade without much of a burden and little to upset your progress. Even on a rainy day when no field work is possible it can be easy to sneak in some quick cleaning instead. The game will always serve you up the task cards for any sort of time sensitive activity, and even with some odd controls on selecting the desired menus on the PlayStation 5, the major asks for broader wine-making can become pretty automatic. Making higher quality wine does require you gradually discovering the best Body, Sweetness, Tanin, and Acidity ratings for specific grape varieties, which you only really figure out by experimenting with menu sliders or options that don’t really ask much of you to tinker with.

Here’s where you’d hope maybe monetary concerns lead to the game’s strategic depth, but if anything, the game’s stinginess with cash just ensures even greater periods of repetitive and safe wine production. While the actual winery running is fairly cheap in regards to the expected income from selling wine, being able to enhance your winery is a shockingly slow and expensive task unless you want to take out hefty loans. To be able to make improvements to your winery like caskets for wine aging or tractors that are marginally better at harvesting, you’ll need to drop lofty sums on research. The research tree only unlocks later technology after earlier purchases so high prices gatekeep advancement quite often while those early purchases don’t always even offer a big bump in your capabilities as a wine producer. Even after doing the research you still need to buy the equipment as well, Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator keeping you locked into long safe loops as you can’t even justify investing in interesting upgrades that admittedly don’t even shake up the routine too much once they’re in your hands.

Other tasks are similarly basic and feel like they lack the depth that would make them satisfying to engage with. Sales of produced wine are handled through a basic menu and it’s not surprising to find many turns consist of just accepting all the purchasing offers without much thought as you’re waiting for field work to resolve. You can eventually automate sales but it can give you even less to do on turns, but that can at least lead to swiftly completed turns to make the wine-making process zip by a bit more even if it’s not going to change its shape too much despite the added speed. Your management work sadly becomes just as automatic as your grape crushers as you’re not given much wiggle room or complex considerations… outside of customization. A great deal of attention was paid to minutiae of wine-making, and while this can sometimes just mean you’re picking from a few menu options for small effects is well-described within its wine production context, it can also lead to nicer touches like designing your own brand logo and wine bottles. Much of the game will involve staring at the same field unfortunately, the clean and colorful look at least pleasant and the included Nappa Valley expansion gives you a possible change of setting with its own set of grapes, but it does just feel like a shift in look over an injection of needed depth.

Structure is what Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator feels like it needs most, pressures and goals a good way to potentially break effective but bland work cycles, and it does make some attempts at it. The game features a story mode where you’re an office worker named Emma who inherits a winery. She’s a bit of a joker which can help keep things from becoming dry when she ends up immersed in the terminology heavy world of wine production, but the story makes some unusual choices. There are a good deal of characters you chat with as well as a broader plot about winery owners not thinking much of a novice entering a well established system, but mostly you’ll find your work interrupted so Emma can go chat with someone. A lot of interactions feel like they’re setting up the groundwork for characters you’ll interact with time and again, but after getting to know the basics of this cast, suddenly the story wraps up without much fanfare. The people you got to meet across the three hours seem to mostly be there for flavor or providing tutorials, but the saddest part of it all is the story just seems to progress at its own pace. Your work with the winery doesn’t feel connected much to the plot’s events, its central conflict feeling like it resolves itself rather than any winemaking activities influencing it.

The challenges at least finally apply some strong pressure that can help break up the functional monotony. Challenges have set turn limits within which you need to do things like earn a certain amount of money or produce wines of a certain quality. They give you a good deal of initial cash on hand to get the ball rolling a bit faster and some direction that can’t be shirked for pure productive profit means you do have to take some risks and make some choices on how to invest time and money. One unfortunate element of them though is that the goals about hitting a certain quality for grapes also requires experimentation first, and that’s better done in the story (which allows you to run the winery as you like after it’s short tale) or the endless modes. Moving the sliders around to find the right levels will give you the information needed for how to process certain grapes, and there’s little reason to do that over in the challenge mode where there’s a risk of failure for making the wrong guesses. Still, there is at least room in the challenges for there to be some danger beyond the consequences of overspending while trying to speed up the regular play in search of something more engaging and varied.

THE VERDICT: Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator puts all its care and attention into the little touches in describing winemaking as well as a pleasant aesthetic, and yet that heart feels at odds with its cold and repetitive management aspects. Prices and pacing keep you stuck in a specific work flow that keeps the winery moving along but means investing in new interesting technology takes too long and even then doesn’t shake up the standard approach the card-based task system enforces. Experimentation is slow and basic too and the story, while starting off cozy enough, wraps up suddenly and without the player feeling like they had a hand in its ending. Challenge mode can barely make the systems at play feel more robust as it demands certain risks be taken, but otherwise this wine making simulator mostly reproduces the feeling of a steady and stagnant job.

And so, I give Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator for PlayStation 5…

A BAD rating. The somewhat stilted controls for menu management in Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator’s PS5 port definitely take some getting used to, but when you’re starting out its story and unaware of its gameplay shallowness, it’s easy to find a simple satisfaction in lining up the tasks on the grid. Perhaps the reason the plot quickly wraps up though is to get players to leave before they see that. Despite it having depth in how it can describe the wine making process, your participation in it is so detached and robotic that you’ll be aching for some disruption to incentivize breaking the production pattern. The challenges do add some appreciated structure that asks you to think more beyond “maybe in three wines I can afford that research that will simplify my already hands-off work”, but really the price gating might be where Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator stumbles most. A separate currency for research would do wonders in freeing up the ability to embrace the broader ideas of wine production and it could be something you earn in greater numbers based on how well you produce wine. Higher quality wines do bring in more cash of course, but growth needn’t be littered with so many roadblocks considering the game’s limited room for meaningful depth already. Most aspects of finding out how to best produce a wine involve menu choices that have unambiguous effects on your wine and it’s just about whether you guessed right, so deeper choices and the ability to develop useful research more quickly could even just mask that if not improve it by increasing the range of variables. Instead, Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator feels like a pretty consistent march, doing the same things, tweaking them a touch when it turns out it wasn’t the optimal way, but rarely stepping out of line to actually look into new interesting things that don’t shake up the core production loop much anyway.

Based on how the story puts so much focus on introducing wine society ideas and related characters without going too far with them, it could be that Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator really isn’t going for a game with depth so much as a simulation of an expected “winemaker’s life”. You don’t have to get too deep into the work here, partly because there’s not much room to do so, so you can just slap down the task cards on the grid and have another wine ready to customize your bottle for and name. You can look at a 3D representation of grapes from the field and pretend you are inspect them for quality, and some of your customers, despite just being small menu options, will have a bit of dialogue saying how they’re hosting a small party or just want a personal bottle. This a winery management simulator mostly for people who don’t want the deeper considerations that might involve or potential instability that could come from real quotas or major shakeups, and the repetitive and steady play might slake that specific thirst. Outside the challenges though, there’s not going to be much to latch onto for those not looking for a specific toothless representation of winery life, meaning they’ll be lucky to get some decent play out of Hundred Days.