Review: Stardew Valley (2016, PC)

I first encountered farming simulators at the tender age of seven. I was staying the night at a friend's house and he let me play Harvest Moon on his Gameboy. At the time it seemed like a boring concept (even as an adult the idea of simulating farm work sounds objectively lame) but I found myself enjoying the game far more than I expected. After we went to sleep I secretly pulled out the Gameboy and kept playing for hours under the cover of darkness.

For a long time Harvest Moon was basically the only option you had if you wanted to virtually farm. Eventually you had cash grab imitators like Farmville pop up with the advent of social networking, but they never scratched the same itch. They had stripped the gameplay to its bones and forced you to wait an arbitrary amount of time just to progress, leaving them as poor facsimiles of a fondly remembered childhood.


I was thus blindsided in 2016 when Steam recommended to me Stardew Valley. Harvest Moon hadn't had a publicly-notable release in ages, the market was saturated with ad-driven mobile games and retro visuals, and it was a breath of fresh air to be able to smash rocks, milk cows, cut down trees and plant poorly-organized gardens again. At first I played it only briefly, real life keeping me from getting sucked in too deep. In fact it wasn't until my 3rd attempt at playing (in as many years) that it really dug its hooks into me.

The premise, if you're unfamiliar with these types of games, is simple enough: You inherit a farm from a now-deceased relative. Looking to get away from the stress of city life, you decide to move in and rejuvenate the decaying ruins of this family farm while making a name for yourself in the titular surrounding area.

Broken into days, months, and years, time passes surprisingly quickly in the Valley. The first couple of days are straightforward as you spend most of your time pulling weeds and chopping down trees to clear out a space for your future plots, but very soon the game opens up and becomes much more. You can fish, forage, and explore the nearby mines to your hearts content. There's also a surprisingly robust relationship mechanic with the townspeople that can earn you special cooking recipes (which you can cook with the produce you grow yourself), gifts, and a spouse if you put forth enough effort.

None of these things are unique to Stardew Valley, mind you. These are mechanics you can find in many of the Harvest Moon games, with varying degrees of success. What makes Stardew Valley standout is that it handles these aspects far better than any Harvest Moon game ever has. Fishing, for example, is handled by a fairly intuitive minigame reminiscent of the now-ancient Helicopter Game from the days of the early-00s internet.

Not everything is perfect, as few things ever are. The keyboard & mouse interface could do with a handful of quality of life improvements (like the ability to cycle through your inventory bars without opening your inventory, a feature present when using a controller). Searching for specific fish can be a little confusing if you don't use an online wiki for assistance, and on festival days the entire town shuts down. If you attend said festivals for any length of time you're always dumped back on your doorstep too late in the day to accomplish anything else. This seems like a design choice meant to encourage players to engage with the townsfolk, but more often than not I found it to be little more than a "forced day off". Still, you're notified when the events will be happening so you can prepare in advance.

The game "ends", for all intents and purposes, at the outset of Year 3, at which time you're visited by the ghost of your dead grandpa, here to compliment you on how much you've accomplished in such a short time and definitely not answer any questions about what it's like to be a ghost. They wish you well and you're left to your own devices in perpetuity. There are no credits that start rolling and there's no indication of real finality, but it's at that point that you have experienced all of the pre-planned content (television shows, festivals, and the like) and it begins to repeat.

It's difficult to review video games because, as an artform, they combine so many different mediums. How do you fairly weigh story quality against gameplay quality? Or the visual accomplishments against sound design? A quick way to tell, for some, is to go by how much time you spent playing the game, but I find that approach wanting. All that being said, in the interest of being succinct, I give Stardew Valley 3.5 Jakes out of 5 Possible Jakes.

The gameplay is superb, the art style meshes with the tone very well, and there's certainly plenty to do, but the lack of any real story has and always will hamstring these types of games. Additionally, the cost of some end game upgrades seems to be balanced around arbitrarily extending playtime rather than adding anything significant to the game.

I highly recommend you try out Stardew Valley, even if you're not a fan of the genre. Its problems are few and will be largely acceptable to the layperson. Plus, it's just downright fun.