Stardew Valley is an indie farming simulator game releasing on PC in February 2016. The game was developed by ConcernedApe, and published by Chucklefish Games.

Stardew Valley is heavily influenced by the Harvest Moon series. At the start of the game, you are left a plot of land by your grandfather. When you arrive at this land, you will find it overrun with weeds, trees and rocks. Your aim is to clear this area and restart a farm that will make you money. There is a heavy focus on character interaction too. Allowing you to converse with plenty of NPCs around the town and develop relationships which can sometimes result in marriage. This has benefits to your farm as the NPC will also help out around the plot too. As you grow your farm day by day, you will unlock new ways to generate money, whether it is from simply growing crops in the fields, selling fish, or your livestock. The game also has a questing system which will also generate extra revenue for you as well.

The game’s day night circle is really a key feature in the game too. You will soon realize that there are just not enough hours in the day to get everything done. Not only are you battling against time, but you are also up against an energy meter too. I wasn’t that keen on the energy meter because literally everything you do burns the meter down fairly quickly. When you start out the game and are just clearing away weeks, you will perhaps get 5 minutes’ worth of clearing done before your character is out of energy and has to go to bed in order to regain it. You can regain your energy in other ways but the conventional way is just to head to bed and wait until the next morning. The game’s fishing system is also a little cumbersome too, it’s a small mini game when you head out to the waters to catch some fish; I personally found this a little too unforgiving but some may find the difficulty on the fishing feature to be a nice addition rather than just pointing and clicking.

Normally I am not a fan of this style of graphics, but Stardew Valley has just the right amount of character to make this work for me. The game’s vibrant colours and beautiful sprites just make everything click together. It really does remind you of the Harvest Moon series of games, but has its own unique charm to go along with it. The sound track for this game is also exquisite too, so much so that you can purchase the sound track individually too. The game’s ambiance sounds are wonderful too. This is one of the few games where I think not having voice acting worked in its favour, because if it had been done wrong, it could of spoilt the whole game for me.

This isn’t a hard game as such; it is just a time management game, and a waiting game for the majority of the time. You can get yourself in a situation where your farm will almost fail like I did; spending all my money on seeds, planting them, and then a storm coming over night and ruining them all, resulting in me not having enough money to buy more seeds. That is the hardest moment I have found in the game, building you up again after a really big knock back. But if you are happy to put the work in, you will succeed with flying colours in this game.

I have been playing Stardew for a little under 20 hours so far. I have been primarily focusing on building up my farm and growing my empire; I have yet to touch many of the quests and NPC interactions with plenty of content still to see, I anticipate at least another 15 hours or so before I grow (no pun intended) of this game. What I am most excited about is the possibility of a four player co-op mode being released. This will make the game an absolutely epic experience in my opinion.

Technically, as expected the game runs perfectly fine, with 60 FPs 100% of the time. The game has full controller support, but I found playing with keyboard/mouse to be better in this instance. There is a fairly comprehensible menu with lots of options to change should you choose. I will give the devs props here; they are a very active community member with plenty of hotfixes being released, not to mention the mod scene is increasingly becoming more and more popular with this game.

Stardew Valley is a game that you will either love or hate. If you go into this game expecting plenty of action and fast paced game play, you will be disappointed. If you want a peaceful, slow paced experience, then you will definitely want this game in your library. There were times that I was sometimes just playing mindlessly and the thought of “am I actually having fun here?” kept popping into my head, and sometimes the answer was no, to which I quit the game, but low and behold, 10 minutes later I felt my self-compelled to load it up again just to farm that one last batch of crops I have growing. It is a very additive game that kept me coming back for more and more every time. At the moment I am going to highly recommend Stardew Valley; if the devs follow through on the multiplayer addition, that will quite possibly tip it towards the must play side of the scale.

Tom’s Score Card
1) Stay away
2) Not Recommended
3) Only recommended when on sale
4) Recommended
5) Highly recommended
6) This is a must play