A Review of Stardew Valley

I’ve been engrossed in a number of games lately... well, three games. The number is three. Anyway, seeing as they’ve been taking up all my free time lately, I haven’t written anything for a while, so I thought I might as well write about these three games in quick succession. The first game that crashed everything else I’ve been doing during my free time is Stardew Valley.

Stardew Valley is one of the most absorbing games I’ve played since the first time I played Dark Souls... which was actually earlier this year. Oh, and I also first played Resident Evil 4 around the same time and then quickly played it again two or three times, so I guess that was pretty absorbing as well.

Okay, Stardew Valley is a very absorbing game that I played recently. I’ve never played a Harvest Moon game before, but seeing as Stardew Valley is apparently just Harvest Moon with a different name, but also not a cheap rip-off of Harvest Moon, I’m just going to assume that Stardew Valley is basically the first Harvest Moon game I’ve played. I quite like Harvest Moon... probably. I certainly like Stardew Valley, so I’m extrapolating.

Anyway, enough about a technically unrelated series of 16-bit farming simulators, let’s talk about Stardew Valley, a game that has an advantage over the 16-bit farming simulator series in that you don’t have to go through a disambiguation page when you try to look it up on Wikipedia.

Stardew Valley puts you in the role of Santa Claus’s grandchild, who inherits Santa’s workshop after he dies. The workshop however has been converted into a farm by the time that you arrive and it’s now your job to rebuild the derelict farm and integrate yourself into the local Lapland community. Okay, your grandfather had a really large beard, that’s where this Santa Claus joke is coming from, but it’s getting a bit silly now, so I’m going to stop doing it.

You move into grandfather’s farm and are given the task of rebuilding it and integrating yourself into the eponymous community within which it is located. The game starts off quite simple, you have a handful of parsnip seeds, a few basic tools, and a list of community members to seek out and introduce yourself to. That’s really all the introduction you get, after starting this you will be forever trapped in the game and will never be able to escape it as there is SO MUCH STUFF TO DO IN THIS GAME.

You have crops, you have chickens, you have ducks, you have rabbits, you have cows, you have pigs, you have goats, you have sheep, you have a horse, you have foraging, you have beekeeping, you have wine-making, you have jam-making, you have mining, you have fishing, you have treasure hunting, you have the Sisyphean task of being ten-star friends with about 30 different characters.

Those character interactions are actually where the game is at its best, writing-wise. I didn’t get to many 10-star friendships but I got to a handful of seven-star friendships. I think one of my favourite ones was Shane, who you help through an alcoholic depression.

The thing about Stardew Valley is that there is really so much stuff to experience within the game. I would call it an ideal desert island game. If I was trapped on a desert island for a year, Stardew Valley would be one of the games I would take with me, because you could spend weeks at a single playthough, just trying to build things and experimenting with different ideas, not to mention that fact that it would take you even more weeks just to experience all the individual character storylines.

After about three weeks of playing Stardew Valley, I figured I had to stop. I had saved the community centre, married Abigail, had my two-year review from Grandpa, I had shipped every item, caught every fish, donated every mineral, cooked every dish, completed almost every quest, found all 8 rarecrows, built Pam a house, had two children, and, inspired by Yahtzee’s Dev Diary on The Escapist, built myself a winery using the greenhouse.

I was going towards 100% completion towards the last week of my playthrough, because there is a parasitic 100% completionist in me, and I almost got there, with only a few things missing. I hadn’t reached level 100 in the Skull Cavern; I hadn’t reached many of the Monster Eradication Goals; I hadn’t bought the golden clock from the wizard, because come on; and one final thing which made me give up the game altogether: WHERE THE HELL WAS THAT FUCKING ANCHOR??? It was the only artefact that I hadn’t found, but I spent the better part of two fucking years looking for that cunting hunk of rust.

After I officially gave up looking for the anchor, I finally decided to draw a line under the game and move onto something else... and then a few days ago at the time of writing, there was a huge content patch for the game. Just what the game needed was more stuff to do. I logged back in briefly to take a good look around at all the new things and what I found was that had no long shipped every item, caught every fish, cooked every dish, there were now more quests to do, more community upgrades, more regions to explore with more characters to meet, more friends to make. This game is like some kind of cancer from the opposite universe where it ruins your life through fun and enjoyment. It’ll be a long time before I even think of diving back in to this overwhelming ocean of gameplay, character writing, and lists, so big that you could drown in them.

Meanwhile, during my playthrough of Stardew Valley, my birthday came and went, and for my birthday I was given a Nintendo Switch. I played Super Mario Oddysee for about half an hour and then went back to playing Stardew Valley for two weeks. After finishing with Stardew Valley... actually that wording is very appropriate; you don’t finish Stardew Valley, you finish with Stardew Valley. Anyway, as I was saying, once I was finished with Stardew Valley, I went back to Super Mario Odyssey, which will be the next to the three absorbing games that I write about. Probably tomorrow.

Oh, fuck, now I’m definitely going to have to write about it tomorrow.