Hundred Days from Broken Arms Games is a lovely winemaking sim that is a must-play on Nintendo Switch. Learn more in our Hundred Days review!
Hundred Days from Broken Arms Games is a lovely winemaking sim that is a must-play on Nintendo Switch. You’ll choose which vines to grow and will learn how to take care of them and harvest them so that you can make your own wine and market it. Every choice you make along the way will have an impact on the final product, so you’ll need to pay attention so that you can decide if you’re going to focus on quality or quantity for each season since you won’t be able to have both!
Before you start your winemaking journey with Hundred Days, you’ll first need to customize your business. The first step will be to select the name of your winery. After that, you can select the logo and background for your bottles from the almost 90 logo options and more than 30 background options. Once you’ve settled on those, you can select the color for the logo and for the color for the background from the more than 30 color options. After that’s been taken care of, you’ll be ready to go!
You’ll get introduced to the gameplay mechanics by way of a precise tutorial that will give you new information as you progress through the Story Mode. You’ll receive cards that represent the activities you can perform, which you can then drag and drop on the board as needed. Since you’re just getting started and have no idea of what fate has planned for you, you won’t have much to do other than checking your email inbox, but things certainly get more interesting once you get your company rolling! The board represents the working day, and each activity will occupy a specific space, so you’ll need to rotate the cards in order to optimize your workflow and make the most of each day.
There are several options for how you want to play Hundred Days. You can take on the Story Mode, which takes place in Piedmont, and takes you through the whole process from start to finish as you try to make a name for yourself and your wine in the industry. There’s also an Endless Mode and a Challenge Mode to take on, which can be played either in the Piedmont region or in the recently released Napa Valley region, which is available on Nintendo Switch as a free update at no extra cost.
The game can be played with the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con or with the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller by selecting cards and placing them with the left analog stick and the A button, pressing the X button to execute your choices to get your day going. To rotate a card, you can press the ZL and ZR buttons as needed. There’s also the option of using the console’ touchscreen when playing Hundred Days in Portable or Tabletop Mode or if you decide to work on your new winemaking business on a Nintendo Switch Lite.
Your first week will be spent with all of the boring office stuff that needs to be sorted out before getting down to the part of the gig that people think of when they hear the word winemaking. But what the initial segment will teach you is that each card will take a set number of days for said action to be completed. On top of this, some activity cards will have a special result or outcome, so you’ll need to follow up and check the blinking icon on the board so that you can see what needs to be done next. This is how you end up inheriting some vineyards to care for!
There’s a lot to learn in this game, but I won’t be going over all of it in this Hundred Days review since that would spoil your enjoyment of this fine release! I will mention a couple of things just to give you an idea. You’ll have, for example, to consider weeding. Weeding is about preserving the moisture of the soil, which is a must if you want to grow healthy vines. In other words: weeds bad, vines good.
Another important step in the process is crop thinning. By doing this, you’ll remove some flowers and grapes on your vines in order to manage yield for an overall better outcome. Yield is crucial since it will allow you to know the number of grapes that are produced per unit surface, grapes that are then, in turn, made into the wine you’re going to bottle. You’ll then be ready to harvest the grapes, but that’s a task you won’t be able to take care of on your own! You’ll need to hire an oenologist to leave little to no room for mistakes.
You can’t have wine without fermentation, and you must decide about different elements in the process, which will yield different results. Fermentation will consume sugar in order to create alcohol. Depending on the yeast selected and the duration of the fermentation process, you can end up with a variety of different flavors for wine. Fermentation will affect the body, sweetness, tannin, and acidity of the wine, and depending on the grape variety, there are some optimal levels to hit for each of said values.
Tools are a must for any winemaker, so be sure to check the cellar to see which tools and rooms are available for you. You’ll need tanks, barrels, and presses to turn grapes into delicious, aromatic wine. Just remember that tools can get dirty or break, so be ready to fix them ASAP! Always check the data for each tool so that you can know about their size, maintenance cost, and repair cost, as well as review their current status. Winemaking is an expensive endeavor since you’ll also need a rinsing-blowing module, a capping module, and a labeling module to be able to produce your wine bottles! Your warehouse is where you’ll store the wine bottles that are ready to be sold. You’ll also need to keep in mind that you’ll need to build new rooms to handle things such as marketing in order to improve the volume of orders that you receive.
There are many upgrades for you to purchase with your money. If you want your business to succeed, you’ll certainly have to purchase board upgrades so that you have a larger surface to work on. You can also spend your money on things such as a cleaning room where to clean and give maintenance to all of the company’s tools or hire additional employees to be assigned to a vineyard to take care of work. Maybe you’d also like to invest in being able to age your wine or purchase a steel tank with a higher capacity and resistance. Setting up a shop will help you bring extra customers to your vineyard, and you could even set some guided tours of the premises!
And when money gets tight, it might be time to look into a loan! You can select how much money you need and how many years you’ll need to pay it back. This will determine the interest rate you’ll have to consider for the loan, the total debt to pay, and the cost all of this will have in each turn. Be sure to take all of this into consideration since there’s a big difference between a €10,000 loan to be repaid in a year and a loan for the same amount to be repaid in 3 years, and this could directly impact your chances of repaying the loan and having your business survive through it all!
Going back to the Napa Valley DLC, which is now available for Hundred Days at no extra cost, it adds new content that mixes things up, helping to keep the experience feeling fresh. There are new grape varieties, new gameplay mechanics – such as grape auctions – new aging options, as well as new challenges to complete. I suggest that you first take on the Story Mode for the Piedmont region before you go and take a trip to Napa Valley.
There’s an in-game achievements system for you to work on as you play through Hundred Days. You’ll get one for producing a wine with quality 75+, increasing your fame to levels 50 and 100, upgrade your winery to level 5, upgrade your warehouse to level 5, upgrade your tool shed to level 5, reaching €250,000 on your bank account, becoming a millionaire, making a very, very bad wine, experiment with the flavor of your wines, producing an outstanding wine with quality 100, as well as progressing through the Story Mode and completing it.
There’s a lot to do in Hundred Days, and once you get started, you’ll keep coming back for “just one more round” as you work on a wide variety of grapes and wines. You’ll learn more and more as you progress through the story mode, giving you a better understanding of how each process takes place in real life. How else would you learn that the number of buds left in the vine will affect quality, quantity, and grape ripeness, and how every wine variety has its own favorite pruning process? Hundred Days is out on Nintendo Switch with a $29.99 asking price.
Disclaimer
This Hundred Days review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Broken Arms Games.
