Play relevant month: Stardew Valley

For my final game of the year on this final day of the year, I present to you a game that sold a million copies and looks like a mix between a SNES game and something off an Amiga at best. A extremely simple and easy to play game that weirdly requires I blow the introductory paragraph on explaining what the game actually is. Simple to play, simple to learn, difficult to describe.

Stardew Valley is a bit more difficult to define because it does not generally fit into a large, well known genre. It gets compared to Harvest Moon, but what if you're like me and you've never played Harvest Moon? Ostensibly the game is classified as a low-key, low-seriousness farming simulator but addressing it as such is pretty disingenuous. Rather, Stardew Valley is a farming game that then wraps itself around a massive assortment of mini-games that interconnect. It's not a clicker game, though there is a lot of clicking, and it's not much of a simulator either. It's also not all that open-ended, and it feels like it has a lot of mechanics it actually does not.

Much like Axiom Verge last year, which was likely my favorite game of the year, Stardew Valley is a solo programmer project built from the ground up over several years of development. More so than Axiom Verge, it's also a critical and financial success, though not quite to the scale of something like Terraria I don't think? But pretty close, and pretty deserving on the most part.

It's a really weird game to review...

On the surface, Stardew Valley is about moving out to the boonies with a pinch of coins, a couple cruddy tools and a bunch of overgrown land your grandpa's old shack sits on. That describes the first couple in-game days, but it rapidly expands out to - as I said - a variety of minigames that interact. You are meant to grow crops, but you can expand to animals (I waited til the second year) as well as grow fruit trees. You can take the resources you've harvested, and turn them into food, and that leads into the next mini-game: Socialization. Or you can just eat it to have more energy, which is one of two resources ticking down every day - energy and time. From there, you make friends, which triggers little cutscenes and little hints about what to do next. You need to harvest resources to construct new buildings, which drives you into the mines, which turns into monster hunting and eventually you find yourself fishing too.

Every resource keeps looping through the different systems. You need metal and sap to build the most useful early fishing lure, so you go cut down trees and head back to the mine. You need to make friends to get their recipes, but you need to cook delicious food or find precious gems to give as gifts. Back to the mines, grow different crops, build more buildings to open up more options, cook different food. Better food gives you more energy, makes you better at the mine. Upgrade your tools, your buildings, your animals... It's one system into the next for hours of gameplay. Like, many hours.

Though the game is very simple, that interaction between systems is what gives it longevity. You always have another goal building, some long-term and some more short-term going on at the same time. It's not a very punishing game, which works well, since you're always on the clock and always rushing to make an appointment, finish a goal, get another project started.

Visually Stardew Valley is a sort of SNES era pixel art game and sort of not. Most of the time it is pleasant enough looking; nothing about it is going to wow you. There's a couple disparate elements that look like either the art was rushed or done by someone outside the main sprite artist that clash, but it's such a chill game I barely noticed. It does pop out every once and a while. I realize that yes, it's a one man show, but it feels like someone else did the work. Not that they necessarily did.

The music, though, is a real strength of the game. I mean the audio in general is enjoyable but the music has seasonal tracks and tons of them. Sometimes the music goes quiet and allows noises to come through, and sometimes it is rattling off catchy beats that help extend a layer of flavour into the game. Apparently, as Stardew Valley has one singular dev, he also did the music. Talented guy!

What makes Stardew Valley an interesting play experience is simply the variety of events, personalities and gameplay that encompasses the game. This is both a blessing and a curse, as you're generally expected to till the soil, raise animals, fish, flirt, make friends, cook, more fishing, mine the depths and all the other stuff I'm forgetting. If you don't like a gameplay element, unfortunately, it's pretty likely you need to do it to unlock stuff to progress in the game. On the other hand, while I totally hated fishing when I started out, getting through fishing during winter time (when there is little else to do) was enjoyable enough.

There's always something else, something new or that you haven't done in a while, to do. In fact, even getting to the point where I felt done with the game, I still had more to do and just couldn't really be arsed to keep going. I feel like the game's financial situation is a bit undertuned, insofar as not really feeling much of a pinch from about month 2 on. This leads to a pretty rapid sense of tedium. It does cost a ton of gold to properly fertilize soil, but you can tune which crops to what and end up gaining back that money anyway. Crops just pour out buckets of gold.

The little cutscenes and interactions are a high point as well. No, the game isn't astoundingly well written and most of the villagers feel like walking archetypes, but it does surprise you. And there's just a lot, with bolder attempts to inject personality than you'd expect. I was surprised to see one of the characters stressed out and smoking, or see the one neebish dude whinging over his lady problems. Most of the cutscenes are just cute fluff, or weird sex jokes, but there's so much more than I was expecting.

hug your chickens and ducks

Animal husbandry is something of a weird hassle in this game, as well, but the ducks and chickens are ridiculously cute. I say weird hassle because you need to set up grass fields for them to eat and harvest hay from, but also you're supposed to pet them every day. They like it. The game has a lot more cute touches along those lines I don't want to get into for fear of spoiling too much of the game's elements. This is a game I absolutely recommend you try to avoid wiki'ing the "best way to play" for a couple hours. I just grew crops and descended into the mines for the first year, and it was quite fun indeed.

Stardew valley isn't a flawless game but most of its flaws are subdued by how relaxing and easy-going the game is. The one big one, at least with KB/M, is that the controls kind of rather suck. Your farmer uses his tools in awkward, often different ways from tool to tool. Some you can use the square you're standing on, some can only be in front of you, and some tend to fire off at random. There's input lag on changing directions in combat, and you often find yourself fumbling with the stupidest of tasks.

Inventory management is also a huge issue. The game has tiers of quality, and honestly, they're incredibly irritating. It adds very little beyond tedium to the game until you're getting down to the post-fifty hour nitty gritty. If you have a crop of four different plant types, you end up with 12 slots taken up. Six and you're using half your maximum bag space, plus you've got six tools and usually 3-5 slots you can't give up. Add some animals, fruit trees and whatever else...? Basically your inventory is always, always full. It feels like tools shouldn't use the inventory and maybe you should have some sort of 'attire switch' where you change equipment, and with it, the contents of your bag entirely for another job. But it's a very basic game, and ultimately, I think it comes down to the quality decision. You'll do something with quality once or twice in a week, you'll run into inventory concerns three times a day once your farm is big enough.

And yes, of course, you could grow one crop and farm one animal with one kind of fruit tree, but you need crops to fire off recipes and pulling back from the overlapping systems simply worsens the appeal of the game.

It's worth noting as best I can tell you can only save when you go to bed each night. This didn't bother me so much, since you can just leave the game running in the background as it is about as far from a resource hog as possible, but you can't really pop in and out as casually as the rest of the game's framework feels. It's possible I missed it.

Kinda funny, when I think about it. Stardew Valley's biggest uniqueness is how many little flaws and problems you could polish away but ultimately don't really care much about.

In conclusion... Is Stardew Valley the best game I played this year? I feel like 'no', but it's definitely a great little title for stretching out and unwinding. It's definitely one of the best chill-out relaxation games I've come across in a long time. Maybe in years. A cheerful little indie experience that I hope gets a sequel with better control schemes and maybe a bit more interesting combat in the mines, but as is, something I definitely think most people will find enjoyable.