Dinkum Review - A Love Letter to Australiana
Farming simulators are, in many ways, colonisation simulators. You show up to an empty overgrown location, you cut down trees and mine for minerals, and you set up agriculture and infrastructure. Progress in a farming simulator is not based on protecting the natural environment—it’s based on manipulating it to your own ends. This isn’t inherently a criticism: it’s a videogame, not reality, and we can enjoy ourselves while recognising that turning overgrown environments into tidy rows of crops is not something we should necessarily aspire to in our daily lives.
But I find it harder to suspend my coloniser guilt when playing Dinkum compared to other farming sims. In Dinkum, your character travels to an island that is explicitly inspired by the Australian outback in terms of its wildlife, climate, flora, and biomes. I am Australian, and it’s delightful to explore spaces that feel deeply familiar—but it’s also an unsettling recreation of my country’s history. When the first European settlement was started in Australia in 1788, the British treated the continent like it was empty too, despite it being inhabited by between 300,000 and 700,000 First Nations people who had called Australia home for at least 65,000 years.
Dinkum isn’t set in 1788, however, it depicts a post-apocalyptic version of Australia, hinted at by the occasional metal drum and rusty kangaroo sign you discover. It seems these relics somehow survived whatever fate the island was met with, but any buildings, roads, and people were completely destroyed. This means that there isn’t an existing population to contend with. In fact, there isn’t evidence of Aboriginality in Dinkum at all.
When the game was first released in early access, there was some controversy about this. It made me hesitant to play the game back in 2022, not wanting to support a depiction of Australia that was, at best, inaccurate and, at worst, racist. I was heavily influenced by an excellent article by Nich Richie, a First Nations reporter who highlighted that setting games in Australia comes with a responsibility to the Indigenous people of this country. Choices that seem innocuous or silly in another setting have more significant connotations when they’re placed on the distinctive red earth of the Australian outback.
Despite now being a full release title, Dinkum hasn’t added First Nations content. Solo developer James Bendon addressed his decision to avoid Indigenous representation in a reply to a Steam discussion. He stated that because he isn’t Indigenous himself, he thought it would be ‘inappropriate’ to include Indigenous people in his game. I can understand this perspective, and I sympathise with how challenging it must have been to balance the multitude of perspectives he received in response. Do you include First Nations people and culture in your game, despite not having the expertise? Do you try to find consultants who can assist you, despite not having the budget to adequately compensate them? Do you save up the money to bring on an Indigenous writer or designer, knowing that even that may not be enough to insulate you from criticism? It feels easier to just avoid the issue entirely.
But that’s what people have been doing in this country for decades. Schools have historically failed to teach people about Indigenous perspectives and history, and even after First Nations culture was added to the Australian Curriculum as a priority, research has found that ‘teachers are hesitant to engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, fearing to be perceived as tokenistic or making mistakes’. The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) has been attempting to combat this, and explicitly tells teachers to ‘be brave’ despite this anxiety. The consequences of avoiding the topic entirely are too great.
I would argue that game developers also need to ‘be brave’. Although game development may seem less important than the education system, games have the power to influence people—both within Australia and internationally. If games that are set in Australia don’t share the rich cultures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, then these cultures continue to be erased from history. This is its own form of colonisation.
I don’t say all of this because I disliked Dinkum. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. This game is really good, and that means more people are going to play it. Dinkum is clearly a love letter to so many things that are uniquely Australian—our native animals, peculiar biomes, saturated sunsets, and weird vernacular—and I am excited to share these things I also love about my home with a wider audience. I just also wish the First Nations people of this country had been included in Dinkum‘s celebration of Australia.
In addition to being a love letter to Australia, Dinkum is also paying homage to its videogame predecessors. The most obvious influence I can see is Animal Crossing, as you convince travelling visitors to move onto the island more permanently and set up shop, terraform the environment by shovelling dirt and building paths, and run around with a bug net catching all sorts of critters. I love bug catching in games, but I was alarmed the first time my character held up a funnel-web spider with her bare hands and smiled at the camera. Mate, those things are dangerous.
Some of the animals in Dinkum are trying to kill you though, in classic Australian style. There are some obvious ones, like the crocodiles and sharks, but my favourite was the unreasonable amount of time I spent trying to outrun cassowaries—which are called ‘wary mus’ in the game—who were desperate to attack me when I strayed too close to their nests. The animals are so diverse and delightful that I wish there was more you could do with them. You can eventually unlock the ability to tame diggos (dingos) and mus (emus), and your farm can expand to include pleeps (platypuses) and vombats (wombats), but most of the critters you encounter are just there to make the environment feel more dynamic. You can ‘research’ the animals, but this involves trapping them and sending them to a research centre, which felt… problematic. I started trying to take in-game photos of as many species as possible instead, sneaking up on cockatoos, magpies, and scrub turkeys like a virtual birdwatcher. It would be awesome if a system like this was incorporated into the game, making it possible to build an encyclopedia of the animals I encountered without needing to trap them and remove them from their habitats.
I found myself doing this a lot: disliking a skill or system in Dinkum, and using my imagination to modify it. Fishing was unreliable, so I spent more time cruising around on my rowboat and collecting yabbies and pearls from the riverbed than I did with my fishing rod in hand. Farming was next to impossible early on with birds constantly stealing my wheat, so I grew rows of native fruit trees instead of European crops and found much more success. (You need a watermelon or a pumpkin to make a scarecrow, so I had to wait until John was selling them in the store before I had any chance of keeping wheat seeds protected for the full nine days it took them to grow.) After ten hours or so, the game became a lot slower as the task list dwindled, the fetch quests became repetitive, and I gave up the diverse range of activities I could do to favour the things that made me money so I could progress. Despite some issues with pacing, overall Dinkum is full of plenty of things to do—especially if you loved the island customisation and terraforming aspects of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Dinkum has had major updates every couple of months throughout their early access period, responding to player feedback and creating a more robust game experience. Although the full release of Dinkum also has a bunch of new content—including new characters and some better multiplayer settings—I don’t think there’s enough new early game content to demand players restart their save files. Dinkum definitely feels like it’s ready to be a full release title now, but I am hopeful there’s still more to come in the months ahead in response to player feedback. Perhaps the developer could be brave and add First Nations perspectives to the roadmap?
Dinkum was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
