What to do when you’re 25 years old, have a meaningless job in a huge corporation and you don’t feel alive or fulfilled with your life? According to Stardew Valley, going to the countryside is the perfect solution! Your character receives a letter from his late grandfather begging him to take over the farm in a rural village called Pelican Town, which he accepts with pleasure.
Describing a game like Stardew Valley is really difficult. At first glance it seems like a mixture of Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, but if you scratch the surface a bit, you’ll discover that here’s much more to this game than being just a farm-life simulator. From the very beginning, you’re going to be overwhelmed with the number of option you have on how to spend your day. You can plant, fertilise and water your garden, collect honey and maple syrup, make cheese and jam, or spend the day fishing or even killing creeps in the local mine. The activities are divided into different categories such as mining, gathering, gardening, fishing etc, and by doing each of those you will slowly gain skill points in that category which will make you more efficient or unlock new recipes. The only two limiting factors are stamina and the in-game day’s duration, which is about 15-20 minutes in real time. Every action you do, whether it is cutting down a tree or digging, uses up stamina and you may refill it by eating, drinking, or visiting spas that are so elegantly hidden that the author first saw one 6 hours into the game, or sleeping in a bed. Sleeping automatically saves your progress, and it’s the only way to save your game, and it moves the in-game date one day forward. The game itself is divided into four seasons that each last for about thirty days and each has its benefits and limiting factors. For example, summer is an excellent time to grow blueberries while you can use winter to turn them into jam, considering nothing grows then.
The whole system of farming and other actions is complex by itself, but it’s not the only thing Stardew Valley has to offer. After you’ve gotten the hang of things in first few days, and learn how to do all necessary things without passing out from stamina loss, you may choose to go exploring Pelican Town and its surroundings. The town is scattered, maybe a bit more than it was really needed, and is inhabited by about 20 people and children. Every character you come across has their own habits, needs, wishes and routines, and before you know it you’ll catch yourself thinking how Robyn isn’t at her store on Monday because she’s working out with her girlfriends, and that Abigail likes to spend her Wednesdays looking at the river from the northern bridge. You can make friends with the characters, and with some, even take the next step which leads to marriage, kids, divorce and the unavoidable loss of half of your hard-earned belongings. Ok, ok, we’re joking about the divorce and court settlement.
What’s really impressive is that the whole game is a project of one single person. Yes, your read it right – Stardew Valley is completely done by one Eric Barone, who spent a few years of his life creating all graphic elements, sounds, and thousands and thousands of lines of code that brought this game to life. What’s even more impressive is that Eric responds to every bug report and tirelessly keeps polishing the game so much that he published four patches within first five days. That doesn’t mean that Stardew Valley was buggy – all bugs were minor and you could play for tens of hours without encountering one, but it says a lot about how the author, beside his time, put his heart and soul into this game. Maybe that’s why Stardew Valley caused such uproar, that pirate sites were filled with people who claim that they bought the game after trying out the downloaded version of it and advise other visitors to do the same.
If the phrase “just one more turn” became the trademark of one of the best series of PC games, Civilisation – Stardew Valley will certainly become famous for “just one more day” syndrome. It doesn’t happen often that a one-man project has this much impact on the gaming community, and we hope Eric Barone will delight us with more games.
To put it simply, Stardew Valley is worth every penny!
Author: Petar Vojinović
Stardew Valley
Pros:
- An extensive and above all interesting game
- Well thought-out concept with an even better execution
Cons:
- Pelican Town is more scattered than it needed to be, so walking can become tedious
