Stardew Valley - 2024 Review | Why is this game so good?

Note: This review contains very mild spoilers for seasonal events, end-game content, and unlocked gameplay systems, but does not spoil any major character arcs or story events. I don't consider anything in this review to be a major spoiler, but if you're someone who wants to discover everything yourself then you should exercise caution with this review. (And probably shouldn't be reading/watching 45-minute deep-dive reviews in the first place, if so.) It is based on vanilla version 1.6.

 

Stardew Valley is an "open-ended country-life RPG" in which you create your own character and inherit your departed grandfather's dilapidated old farm on the outskirts of Pelican Town, a small rural town in the greater region of Stardew Valley. The core gameplay systems revolve around typical farming activities (which includes planting, watering, and harvesting crops, and tending to various livestock to process their produce, among other things); foraging for natural resources that will be used in various cooking and crafting recipes; fishing the local ocean, river, and lakes to catch assorted fish and treasures with rods or traps; mining for minerals and ore necessary to upgrade your tools and farming equipment while fighting the various monsters that inhabit the mines in an effort to survive its deeper and more dangerous depths; building your relationship with the local townsfolk by talking to them, giving them gifts, completing their requests, and making choices in their various cutscenes; and just in general exploring the town and its surrounding areas as you unlock new areas by advancing through the game, which in turn unlock new gameplay options, with lots of hidden secrets to discover.

There's no clear-cut "goal" you're striving to accomplish in the game, except for a few general suggestions, like restoring the Community Center as a cumulative symbol of your positive influence on the town, or earning your grandfather's blessing by achieving enough success in different aspects of your farm, or the various goals you set for yourself, like setting up your perfect farm layout that maximizes every square space on the map or achieving Perfection by having done literally everything possible in the game. None of these are exactly end-game goals, however, as each one unlocks some new avenue of gameplay possibilities, with the idea being that you can continue playing indefinitely, for as long as you desire to continue playing that save file.
 
As the introductory cutscenes establish, the point of your character moving to Stardew Valley and beginning a new life as a farmer (and perhaps, by extension, why you as a player choose to play Stardew Valley), is simply a means to escape from the pressing burdens of modern life while seeking out a more peaceful, fulfilling, "down-to-earth" sort of lifestyle. That, I feel, is where Stardew Valley really shines. Although it has many compelling aspects working in its favor (like lots of engaging gameplay mechanics with tons of depth and variety to experience and a really satisfying progression system), the real reason I suspect it has such strong appeal with so many people is likely just its charming, immersive premise, and its relaxing vibes and atmosphere. After all, it's a wonderfully idealized version of a wholesome life/setting that I think many of us yearn for, where you're able to live self-sufficiently with no bosses to report to, where hard work and dedication are guaranteed to pay off, with a tight-knit small-town community who come together for all kinds of special events and contribute to society in different ways, with just a hint of magical elements to make it feel fantastical and thus a little more exciting than real life.

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There's a certain cartoonish simplicity to the way this world is depicted, between the pixelated graphics and crude animations, the way certain gameplay mechanics function, and only ever getting short snippets of conversations with people, which has the effect of distilling these situations into their most essential elements and lending a certain purity to the presentation that doesn't distract you with extraneous variables, while also allowing your imagination to fill in the details in the process. Thus, I would theorize that this presentation makes you internalize the details of this setting a little bit more and makes certain things more poignant than if everything were presented with hyper-realistic graphics and truly realistic gameplay mechanics and fully-fleshed-out dialogue.

The characters are surprisingly realistic, however, in spite of their cartoonish presentation, as they each have a lot of hidden depth to uncover as you befriend them. Okay, well, maybe not all of them are completely realistic, but you've got characters like Haley, who experiences a lot of growth as she matures from being a vain, spoiled princess to a more wholesome person taking a deeper, more sincere interest in the world around her; or George who's always bitter and cranky about everything, but as he warms up to you, you learn more about WHY he's so cranky and he starts to change his behavior around you; or Shane who's dealing with serious psychological trauma associated with depression and alcoholism, whom you can have a hand in helping in his road to recovery. It's actually shocking how much I empathized with some of these characters, with some of their cutscenes even bringing me to tears, which is surprising to me given that they're just simple 2D sprites that only ever talk in one or two sentences at a time, but these details really work to flesh them out into feeling like real people you can relate to, which just goes to make the setting all the more believable.
 
Beyond that, the general aesthetics serve in just making the game simply pleasing to interact with, with the visuals and music being a work of art all on their own. The pixel graphics are, of course, a standard element of this type of indie game (and the classic farming simulators that inspired Stardew Valley, of which I personally only ever played Save the Homeland and Friends of Mineral Town), but there's an impressive amount of detail in the environments that makes them visually interesting to look at. I particularly appreciate all of the curved and squiggly lines, with patterns that overlap from one square to another, thus giving everything a more natural appearance that helps to mask the game's grid-based nature, which can often leave some of these games with an overly square, artificial sort of look to everything; and I love the color shading on different things, like with most trees and shrubs having five or six different shades to add depth and texture to their leaves which are all individually painted. It's also nice how there's almost always some amount of movement in the environments themselves, with the flower petals gently flapping in the breeze (or whatever it is they're doing to be moving like that), or the waves in the water gently rippling, or butterflies casually floating around from place to place. Occasionally you'll even see shadows cast from the clouds that move across your fields (Summer 1, day 15), or random animals darting by. With all of the local townsfolk also going about their daily routines, moving through the town and to different locations throughout the day, sometimes just hanging out with their own idle animations, it really gives the Valley a feeling of liveliness to it, just from the amount of independent motion you see happening around you.  

Then you've got the changing seasons that bring a radically different look to the valley -- not just in the natural environments themselves, but also with the seasonal decorations that go up around town -- strongly capturing the tone of each season, especially in conjunction with the wonderful music. Springtime really gives off optimistic vibes of a new start and steady growth in your adventure, while summertime accentuates the hustle and bustle of a busier time of year, then things start settling down in the fall as your production winds down and the environments prepare for winter, with winter offering the most calm and quiet time of year (reflective of your decreased workload), with its beautifully still snow fields and tranquil music.

The musical talent is on full display, here, with so many tracks that are an utter joy to listen to all on their own, but are all the more endearing and (dare I say at this early stage) nostalgic due to how well they associate with specific moods and feelings from the game itself. The Night Market, for example, is a winter event where a traveling fleet of merchant ships arrive at the docks to sell their goods and services; the music for this event could've been anything in the world -- ranging from an upbeat banjo tune like the typical store music you hear elsewhere in the game, to a pirate-style sea shanty song to match the idea of a ragtag band of traveling vessels -- but the actual song is this super chill, down-tempo piece with a ton of airy space and heavy reverb between the notes that gives me a really wistful, almost melancholic sort of vibe, but with a hint of intriguing mystery to it. It really paints this fleet of merchant ships in a truly magical sort of way that you wouldn't get from a country banjo ditty or pirate drinking song, and I can't hear that music without instantly being transported back into that scene, imagining myself sipping on my free coffee and smelling the aromatic spice in the air while listening to the gentle waves of the ocean and the steady creaking of the docks. 

This same setting also serves as host to the Dance of the Moonlight Jellies on the last day of Summer, with the town setting up a series of torches along the beach and casting an illuminated boat out to sea to attract the attention of the migrating moonlight jellies as they continue their voyage across the ocean. It's such an incredibly simple event that basically just amounts to a one-minute cutscene watching a few jellyfish sprites slowly come into view of the camera, but the wonderfully enchanting music combines with the event's thematic symbology, of good times coming to an end as we move on to the next stage of life, with so many aspects of nature and life that we don't fully understand, to create a really emotionally charged scene that sends me back to the bittersweet days of my childhood when summer break was winding down, realizing that those fun days of youthful freedom were almost over and that a whole new adventure awaited in the coming school year. This is sort of reflected by my in-game experience as well; that first summer showed a lot of growth, with me as a player finally getting into a solid groove with my farming and rapidly expanding into bigger fields, taking on bigger workloads and utilizing every hour of every day to try to get as much stuff done as possible; so it was bittersweet for me to be there on the docks realizing that the summer was over and that it would be time for a new routine and new workload in the fall, all-the-while longing for a more carefree life like these moonlight jellies seem to have, carelessly floating on through the ocean currents to the great unknown.
 
It is really easy to feel drawn into this world, to buy-into this being a sort of alternate reality that you can escape to to seek comfort from the stresses of every day life. That's a feeling I don't necessarily get from many of my other, typical favorite sorts of games that usually add some degree of challenge or stresses to overcome (which can be extremely satisfying and engaging elements in their own right) -- but the more laid-back gameplay, here, where you can push yourself as hard as you want or just take everything completely at your own pace with no consequence, where the goal of the gameplay is seemingly just to be in the world enjoying yourself, can be truly comforting.

The game can be quite stressful if you allow it to be, however, given how many tasks it can pile on your lap at one time while also giving you a limited amount of time and energy in the day to get everything done. You've got all your usual daily tasks that take up a good chunk of your time, like watering your crops and milking your cows and all the other things associated with managing and upgrading your farm, but then you've also got notice board requests that need to done within 48 hours (or 7 days for some of the bigger ones); birthdays and special events that need to be done on a specific day as they only happen that one day of the year; shops having a lot of time dependencies with rotating stock for every day of the week, closing at certain times of day, and closing down completely on certain days of the week; plus other random events like trains passing through the mountains or weather conditions that you may need to take advantage of while they're occurring. Sometimes these various factors can overlap to create a really stressful time crunch where you feel rushed to get everything done that you need to do, to the point of even resetting the day if it turns out you missed something really important, and then having to re-do everything while being more efficient with your time and order of operations.
 
I actually really like this time crunch, as I find it scratches the gamer itch in me to overcome challenges and get things done under pressure, while also lending a little more of a structured purpose to the gameplay with needing to accomplish my goals in a certain time frame. But the reality is, there are no major consequences for supposedly "missing" something -- you don't LOSE progress in anything, and everything will eventually cycle back to be doable again at another time, whether it be the next day, the next week, the next season, or the next year. The sole exception to this is a single cutscene with Sam and Vincent on the beach, which must be done in year one, but I believe that is literally the only thing in the game that you can permanently miss. I guess technically you can lose friendship progress with townsfolk by going too long without talking to them, but the friendship loss is so negligible and it's so easy to overcome by just giving them a single liked gift per month, that it really isn't any sort of practical concern. So despite the constant ticking clock in the corner of the screen, you really can take things at your own pace to play as slowly or time-efficiently as you desire.

In fact, there's practically nothing in the game that you "have" to do, as it's fairly open-ended in terms of how you want to spend your time, and how you want to earn your living. You could ignore farming entirely if you really wanted, for example, by earning all your income foraging and fishing, and then spend your evenings in the Saloon drinking cola and playing arcade games. Or spend all your time adventuring in the mines and selling what you earn from defeated monsters and harvested ore veins. Or you could run a ranch and focus exclusively on livestock, or set up a brewery that focuses exclusively on making assorted types of alcoholic beverages. If you want to restore the community center, then you'll of course have to do a little bit of everything, since the bundles that you have to fulfill for the Junimos (who are the magical forest sprites that have moved into the disused community center, who fix up the community center and various other structures around town as you complete their bundles) require select items from all avenues of the game. But even then you could choose to side with the Jojamart (the giant megacorporation who's recently expanded their footprint into Stardew Valley) who will turn it into a warehouse and perform all the other community restorations by just paying them in raw cash, which you can of course gain from any source of your choosing.
 
While not as totally freeform as some other, more sandboxy games in this genre or weight class, it really does give you a lot of freedom to play the game however you want, in whatever way you want. If there are aspects of the gameplay that annoy you or just don't interest you, then you can ignore them completely and just do the things you like; you won't be "punished" or have a "worse" experience for not doing everything in the game to its fullest or not playing the game as intended, seeing as there really is no intended way to play in the first place.

 

In the end, it's really up to your own intrinsic desires and personal creativity as to what you want to do in the game. That's something that normally doesn't appeal to me, as I typically like to have more of a concrete purpose to what I'm doing in the games I play, like a main story-line to see through to its conclusion or a final boss I'm striving to beat, which doesn't really apply to Stardew Valley. But I find it's actually extremely engaging on a mechanical level with the way its progression system steadily unlocks new upgrades, new cutscenes, new areas around town, and new gameplay options, thus providing you with a steady stream of small goals to be working towards and always something new and rewarding to be experiencing with each step of your playthrough.
 
The game starts you out at the most basic level with limited usable farm space and not much more to do around the farm besides harvesting your first batch of 15 parsnips, and not much else to do around town besides introducing yourself to the local townsfolk -- but then it steadily introduces new upgrades and gameplay concepts through quests you get in the mail, which guide you towards other endeavors like visiting Willy at the beach so you can learn how to fish, or harvesting enough resources to get Robin to build you a coop so you can buy chickens from Marnie to start harvesting eggs, to visiting Marlon in the mountains so you can delve into the mines to harvest ore and fight monsters for other rewards, and so on. Along the way you're encouraged to pursue various types of upgrades to your farm equipment which will allow you to do things more efficiently while also ramping up the scale of your production, thus giving you more time and energy in the day to get things done while allowing you to afford even more expensive upgrades. These upgrades will likewise lead to new areas of exploration and gameplay opportunities, like how upgrading your axe enough times will get you access to the Secret Woods where you can harvest a more steady supply of hard wood and also gain access to new quest events, or how donating enough artifacts to Gunther in the museum will unlock the sewers where you get access to a new trader and new quest opportunities with another small new area to explore.

The community center is an even bigger factor in the engine driving the game's progression system. Each room that you restore requires a series of bundled items, linked by a thematic type of in-game activity and often corresponding to a specific season. This provides a LOT of specific goals to be working towards so you always have things you're trying to accomplish each season, with other long-terms goals that you have to plan for as certain bundles require more extensive preparation to fulfill. Individual bundles you complete will then usually offer some kind of small reward that unlocks a new gameplay system, like giving you new farm equipment that you can use to process your produce into various types of artisan goods, which will sell for more money or else be used in other cooking/crafting recipes, which contributes a lot of to the feeling of progress on your farm with being able to expand into new enterprises and increasing the total value of your farm. Then, each restored room will unlock some kind of major mechanical function around town, like clearing the glittering boulder from the mountain lake so that you can start panning the local waters for assorted gems and treasures; or repairing the bus so you can travel to the Calico desert where you can visit a couple of special traders and adventure through the even more difficult mines, there, for more valuable rewards; or repairing the greenhouse on your farm so you can grow crops out-of-season, year-round; and so on.
 
As of version 1.5, there's also an entirely new island you can visit once you complete the community center, which unlocks a whole new farm area and tons of extra gameplay challenges, like solving puzzles and searching for hidden walnuts to unlock different things on the island, and an all-new, more-elaborate volcano mine with a new way to further upgrade your tools and equipment.

The way you progressively unlock new gameplay options, new quest opportunities, new character cutscenes, and new areas of the map to explore, instills the game with a strong sense of discovery that keeps the gameplay fresh and exciting, because there's basically always something new to discover just around the next corner. Even when the calendar cycles back to spring again at the start of year two, where it seems like you might just be getting ready to repeat the exact same cycle all over again, you get new types of crops to plant, a new townsperson to interact with, and, as of version 1.6, new alternate versions of the seasonal festivals to experience. It's also likely that going into the start of year two, you won't have fully restored the community center or unlocked all of the possible upgrades to your farm, in which case there's still all of that extra content to experience in year two. Plus, with all the knowledge you'll have gained and the upgrades you'll have implemented to your farm over the first year, you get the opportunity to go into year two having learned from your mistakes and knowing how to do things more effectively, with also the ability to do things on a bigger scale for more profit. So even though you do end up repeating certain things again in your second year, like planting some of the same crops you already harvested the previous spring, it still feels fresh the second time around because you're now able to do it much better than before due to how much you've improved since your first spring.

The feeling of growth that you experience in this game is extremely satisfying, since you not only get to FEEL your CHARACTER getting better as you level-up your skills and equipment, but you also get to SEE your farm EXPAND and evolve as you clean it up to create new usable spaces to build new structures or to plot out larger fields of crops, and as you continue to acquire more livestock and set up your infrastructure of different devices to process all of your produce. Then there's other aspects like setting up fences to section-off different areas of the farm or to prevent weeds from spreading into areas you don't want them to, or building walkways to prevent tree seeds from germinating in certain areas and to allow faster movement from one area to another, and perhaps even decorating your farm to make it more visually appealing -- all of which are different improvements to your farm that showcase how far you've come from your first day of spring, year one, when everything was a cluttered mess and you had nothing to your name except a few hand-me-down tools and a starting gift of 15 parsnip seeds. Every one of these improvements you make feels genuinely rewarding because it takes a fair amount of hard work and dedication to earn the amount of resources and money necessary to acquire them, and when you're able to apply those proceeds to further upgrades, it's a sure sign that the time and effort you've invested has been paid off.
 
Now of course, the upgrades are also a big part of the game's core gameplay loop, with each upgrade allowing you to produce more resources which you can sell for more money which allows you to buy even more upgrades so you can earn even more money, so on and so on. This can be a pretty engaging loop if you find yourself invested in the game, as it presents a lot of interesting strategic decisions with regards to which upgrades you'll prioritize and how you'll choose to spend your limited resources. For instance, it can be a tough decision early on between upgrading your backpack so you can carry more items (which means less time wasted running back and forth to your storage chests, and fewer wasted resources you have to leave behind), or upgrading your watering can so you can spend less time and energy each morning watering your crops (or conversely spend the SAME amount of time and energy watering a much bigger field which will be worth a lot more come harvest time), or if you should forego both of those and instead save up for a chicken coop so you can start getting a steady supply of residual income through their eggs. Part of that decision will be based on what you judge to be the best use of your resources, but also just your own personal preference as to what type of playstyles you want to focus on. And with so many upgrades unlocking at every step of the game, there are always more things that you want than you can afford to upgrade at any given time, so there's always that yearning feeling of wanting the next upgrade but having to make careful decisions about which ones to actually pursue.

The depth and variety of Things to Do™ in this game is actually pretty staggering. Although the gameplay seems pretty simple on the surface, what with it ostensibly being just a super-chill farming simulator where you just plant your seeds and water them every day until they're ready to sell, once you actually get into the game and start engaging with all of its mechanics, and especially once you start looking things up on the community wiki, you realize how surprisingly complex everything is. I'm really not sure I can do it justice without just listing off a bunch of features or showing charts from the wiki, but to try to give a simple overview: there are just so many different types of crops that you can plant that serve different functions in the game, from basic vegetables and fruits to more specific things like coffee beans and tea plants and fruit trees and rice shoots, each with their own growth cycles and profit margins, and which can be turned into all kinds of different things once harvested depending on the type of produce it is and also what type of processing equipment you use it on, with a bunch of different fertilizers that affect the quality of the crop and the speed at which it grows with different quality levels being worth more when they sell or having lost value when they're converted into artisan goods or other crafting recipes and needing certain speedgro fertilizers to get an extra yield that season which is ultimately more profitable than using a higher quality fertilizer to get better yields from fewer total yields, but then you also need a bunch of other crafting ingredients to set up your infrastructure which means planting different types of trees to tap them for resins which you need to plan in advance, and oh by the way I hope you set up a bunch of lightning rods in summer so that you can harvest batteries from the frequent lightning storms cause you'll need those for more advanced crafting recipes and it DOESN'T storm in winter, but to make those you'll need these other resources which are gained from these other sources and which need this other specific type of farm equipment and if you want to get into fishing there's different types of fish for each season of the year, for each location of the valley, for each weather condition, and every time of day so when you need a specific fish for a quest or recipe you have to cross-reference spawning charts to know when and where to look, but then there's also a complex formula based on luck and skill and random chance for what type of fish you'll get and how easy it'll be to catch and whether you'll get a treasure chest in the process which has its own complex spawning charts to determine the rewards you'll get from it, so on and so on. And that was barely even scratching the surface.

The benefit of this depth and complexity is that it leaves a lot of room for more dedicated, enthusiastic players to really dig into the mechanics with planning their infrastructure and crunching numbers for maximum efficiency, and it also means there's nearly always some extra level that you can tap into to continue evolving your gameplay as you get more familiar with its systems and become more invested in your farm. As with the game's apparent time limits, it's up to you how much you actually want to engage with the deeper mechanics; a hardcore min/maxer may find satisfaction in speed-running their farm to start earning millions of gold by the end of their first year with a complex engine of iridium sprinklers perfectly placed to optimize their tillable space with kegs producing hundreds of bottles of starfruit wine every week, while a more laid-back player may find the same level of satisfaction in maintaining a small field of whatever crops they think look pretty while watering their field by hand each day. And because there are so many different ways to play the game, including different starting farm layouts that each come with their own pro's and con's, there's a lot of room for replay value if you just want to try a completely different playstyle that focuses on different aspects of the gameplay, or do challenge runs like completing the community center in the first year or earning all of your income exclusively from fishing.

The downside to this complexity is that I think it can be overwhelming for new players. The game does a pretty good job of easing you into things over the first week or so of gameplay, by steadily introducing new gameplay systems through quasi-tutorials where characters explain basic concepts to you as they become relevant -- but after a certain point you're kind of just left to your own devices and have to start figuring things out for yourself. That can be confusing at times, like when you start unlocking new crafting recipes where you have to wonder "what is this, how exactly does this work, why would I want to build that, is it going to be worth the cost to make it," or when you get a request for something you've never heard of and have no idea how to go about procuring it, and so on. And with the huge wealth of items and crafting recipes in the game, with more and more Things to Do™ being added with every free update, that can be a lot of information to decipher on your own, especially in situations where a lot of these things are being thrown at you all at once. As a new player, you're straight up bombarded with a ton of items that you just don't have room to carry, and even with building storage chests you're constantly struggling to make room for everything and figure out what things are worth holding onto because they're going to be valuable later on and what things you can afford to get rid of now to free up space. 

There's also a lot of things the game just straight up doesn't tell you, or if it does it's in a vague round-about sort of way that relies on randomly triggering a particular line of dialogue from a passing NPC when that piece of advice might not be relevant, or in library books that you first have to find through random luck (in a system of digging up artifact spots, which you may not even know about because the game doesn't tell you about them until near the end of Winter) and then remember to go check the library to see what the book even was, or on TV channels where that lesson only plays on one specific day of the year and only gives a cursory suggestion of the information, with no way in game to collate and reference any of this information that you unlock. Even just going back to the library to re-read the books can be a pain because they aren't labeled or marked in any way, so you have to blindly click on shelves checking every possible spot until you find the book you want, which may not even tell you what you want to know. Other things I'm pretty sure aren't explained at all, like how to break up with someone you're dating, or how to go about finding the various dwarf scrolls so you can learn the dwarven language. So, there are a lot of situations where you might feel compelled to look up information outside of the game; it's actually not uncommon for people to play with the wiki page up on a separate screen to be able to reference things in an instant, because there's often no good way to check this information in the actual game.

Personally, I really appreciate it when games don't explicitly spell everything out for you, because that then allows for an exciting sense of discovery when you actually learn something new for yourself. Besides all the surface-level stuff with learning how the game mechanics work and how to best run your farm, there are also TONS of hidden secrets to discover, ranging from assorted easter eggs on the title screen, to hidden items behind buildings, to being rewarded for bringing an unexpected item to a particular location, to rare events that trigger special occurrences around town. Some of these are intentionally hidden and are most likely to be discovered purely by accident, but others are specifically hinted at through things like the Secret Notes you can find in your first winter, thus giving you a small puzzle-solving element to work towards. That learning process of putting everything together can be a big part of what makes Stardew Valley such a fun and engaging experience. But even then, speaking as someone who loves the game and who has over 200 hours invested across two different playthroughs, it does still bother me sometimes when I HAVE to check the wiki to figure out why I'm not finding a particular Dwarf Scroll, or where I have to be in what season and what specific time and weather conditions to catch a particular fish, so I do wish this information were easier to find (and reference) in the actual game.

On that note, I do have some notable criticisms to level against the game. For the most part, the issues I'm about to get into are relatively minor and thus aren't significant enough to detract from the game's overall excellent quality or the enjoyment that I get while playing, but they're things I notice that I feel could stand to use a little improvement. So these could be considered mostly nitpicks in the grand scheme of things, and some of it is just based on my own personal taste and experience, but I still feel like they're worth mentioning in the interest of giving a fair and honest review.

Perhaps my biggest issue is that I don't feel like there's a realistic end point when you can stop playing and walk away feeling "finished" with the game, short of going the full extra mile by achieving True Perfection, which involves doing literally 100% of everything possible in the game. That does give you something resembling an actual ending cutscene complete with an "end credits" screen of sorts, but that's not a realistic end point, since most people will never come anywhere close to actually achieving that. Of course I realize the fact that the game doesn't end is the whole point of the game (and this genre in general, with limited exceptions of course), but that does mean that every other playthrough (apart from those seeking Perfection) is inevitably going to end with you reaching a point when you get bored and lose interest, or where continuing on just doesn't feel worth it anymore. And that can be a bit of a bummer to fall in love with a game and then have your last experiences with it be thoughts of "I'm not having fun anymore" as your enjoyment slowly fizzles out until you eventually decide to just stop playing altogether. 

There are a few moments that are often considered "soft stopping points" among the community, but to me, none of these actually feel like a satisfying end point. Getting your grandfather's blessing is arguably the main thing you're trying to accomplish in the game by taking over his farm, but his evaluation triggers automatically at the start of year three, which might not be when you're ready to stop playing even if he's deemed you to have fulfilled all of his criteria. Even then, it just amounts to a 30-second cutscene where grandpa's ghost shows up and he says "You've done a great job restoring my farm, I'm so proud of you. Bye!" And I was like "what!? That's it!?" So that didn't really do it for me. Maybe if the cutscene were more elaborate, and you could choose WHEN to seek Grandpa's blessing, it might work, but as it is, it's a complete non-factor for me. Then, restoring the community center seems like your real, actual goal in the game, but each stage unlocks new gameplay elements, so whatever one you do last means you still have some unfulfilled Thing to Do™ left in the game as a reward for having completed the community center. There's even a whole extra bundle that appears in the abandoned Jojamart after completing the whole thing, indicating that there are still meaningful things left to do with the junimos. And since the update to version 1.5, there's now an entire area on Ginger Island with tons of exciting, all-new gameplay, so finishing the Community Center feels like even LESS of a satisfactory stopping point, now.

Now in fairness I do really like Ginger Island. It's a wonderful change of pace from the ordinary gameplay with exploring the map searching for hidden secrets and solving puzzles to get golden walnuts, which you can use to unlock different areas of the island where you can experience more content or unlock new upgrades. The volcano dungeon is more interesting than either the standard mines or the skull caverns from the base game, too, with it having more complex level designs that require the use of your watering can to create safe pathways over the lava, and occasional floor switches that have to be found in the level before unlocking the door to the next floor. The whole things feels highly reminiscent of old-school Zelda games, specifically Link's Awakening, considering the tropical island setting complete with a mountainous structure at the top-center of the map; hunting for hidden items that give you progressive rewards the more you find; the inclusion of an item trading sequence; and more platforming and puzzle-solving elements in the dungeon environment like you would see in a typical Zelda game. And since I love Link's Awakening, it's only natural that I would also love the homage being paid to it with Stardew Valley's Ginger Island.

Unfortunately, your ultimate reward for doing things on Ginger Island is to unlock yet more upgrades to your farm and your equipment, by gaining access to the forge and Mr Cheese Mr Qi's Walnut Room, which I just had no interest in pursuing by that point of my playthrough because most of the upgrades just didn't seem worth the effort, or all that necessary in the first place. Just looking over the available options for Qi's Special Notice Board, I was just like "I don't want to do any of that," and the forge requires one prismatic shard (which are super rare) per enchantment (which are randomized), so I was like "I really won't get much benefit out of this, either." And that's basically where my playthrough ended: realizing that I just didn't want to play anymore, and quitting. That, to me, is not a satisfying way to the end the game, so again, I just wish there were a more definitive end point somewhere along the way where I could feel a stronger sense of fulfillment and end the game on a proper high note, while still allowing other players who WANT to continue their playthrough the opportunity to do so.
 
Next on my list of criticisms is that the core decision between picking the community center or Jojamart seems absurdly one-sided in the favor of the community center. Not only is restoring the community center more in-keeping with the game's intended theme, considering your character was deliberately trying to escape from the soulless oppression of working for Jojacorp, a place so dystopian that they literally work people to death, but buying seeds from Pierre is straight up better than buying from Jojamart, seeing as his prices are better to start the game without requiring an expensive membership that only makes Joja's prices EQUAL to Pierre's, AND he's closer to your farm so it's a shorter commute any time you need to buy seeds. The only benefit Jojamart has is better hours, since they stay open later in the day and don't close on Wednesdays, but those are easy enough to plan around, so I never felt like there was any incentive to ever do business with Jojamart. It seems like if they actually wanted the Joja route to be a tempting proposition, then their prices should be cheaper than the competition, and it likewise might've been a more interesting decision if there were also gameplay trade-offs for choosing Joja's seeds over Pierre's, like if they were cheaper but less likely to yield gold-quality crops, or if you got extra in-store bonuses by selling your produce directly to Joja to make up for siding with the "evil" corporation that the game clearly doesn't want you to like in the first place. I guess it does give you a faster, easier, and more reliable way to get auto-petters, if you care about that, but it's not enough incentive for me, personally.

 

 

Besides the lack of any practical incentive for picking Joja, I also find the gameplay prospect of just buying community upgrades with raw cash under the Joja route far less interesting than needing to acquire specific items for the junimos. That's more appealing to me because I like having specific goals to be working towards throughout the year, which provides a more engaging challenge, especially when replaying the game and using the option for remixed bundles, which call for more advanced items in random combinations each playthrough. The main benefit I can see to taking the Joja route is that it frees you up to focus on whatever gameplay systems you want without feeling obligated to dabble with everything, which might be appealing to certain players who don't like certain parts of the gameplay. I know a number of people hate the fishing in this game, so I can see the Joja route being tempting for that reason alone. It's nice to have the option as that does allow for some extra role-playing and replay value, but it does feel like sort of a half-baked idea, unless the intention was specifically to make it the less desirable choice for the sake of the theme. In which case, mission accomplished.

Though as an aside, I really like the fishing mini-game, as I find it more actively engaging than most other fishing mini-games I've ever experienced, and I feel like it does a pretty good job of translating the methodology you have to use in real fishing with keeping tension on the line while alternating between pulling up on the rod and reeling down with the line, depending on how the fish moves. I wind up enjoying my time fishing early on, but unfortunately its usefulness wears out before long when you can make so much more income farming than you can fishing. The recent update to 1.6 attempts to buff the fishing with new types of bait, an upgraded fishing rod, and an all-new fish smoker, among other things, but I still find it's easier and more effective to earn cash by just setting up sprinklers and dumping crops into kegs and preserves jars, than it is to spend time meticulously fishing all day.

Next on my list of criticisms is that the social simulation of befriending townsfolk is insultingly simple, and not much better than what I remember from playing the Harvest Moon games 20-some years ago, although it's been a long time and my memory of those games is not great. Regardless, you gain friendship points with people almost exclusively by bribing them with gifts they like and listening to them talk about themselves, with hardly any opportunity for any real interaction. And when you DO get a rare chance to pick dialogue options, the meta-game is almost always to pick the answer that makes the other person feel good, like telling Penny you loved her cooking even after she poisons you with it, or not being a creepy pervert with Leah when she's showing you her art. There's hardly any nuance to these dialogue options, so it's not satisfying identifying the obviously correct or incorrect ones. It would've been nice if there were more complexity in the choices, and just more of them in general so that you could develop more of an actual camaraderie through real interactions instead of basically just buying their friendship. I would love to be able to actually DO things with the townsfolk, like exploring the mines with Abby, or going on a fishing trip with Willy, or foraging for mushrooms with Leah, to name just a few examples. Some of their heart events give you the illusion of things like this, but you're ultimately always just watching a cutscene and maybe picking one or two dialogue options. The two best heart events are the ones where you play Journey of the Prairie King with Abigail, and that tabletop game with Sebastian and Sam, so I would've liked more interactive heart events or activities in general, like those ones.

I do like how triggering their heart events requires other specific conditions, however, like being in the right location, at a certain time of day, in the correct weather conditions, or with the right other people around them, and so on, than simply going up to that person when you've reached the requisite number of hearts with them. That creates a lot of exciting unpredictability as to when you're going to stumble into a cutscene, because they can happen in such seemingly random occasions when you least expect it, which makes the world feel a little more dynamic to have so many events popping up all over the map at different times, with different people as you're going about your daily business. That can make some of them incredibly easy to miss, however, which can once again be another situation where you might feel compelled to have to check the wiki to figure out how to trigger certain heart events.

I also wish there were more variety in the ages of people you could date, especially when it comes to the bachelorettes. As someone in his mid-30's role-playing my in-game character as basically myself, it bugs me that just about all of the date-able women seem to be in their late teens or early 20's. Consider that every one of them except for Leah lives at home with their parents, with characters like Abigail talking about having to do homework and having stereotypical teenage angst with her parents, and Haley having no job and not going to school which makes her seem like she's fresh out of high school just hanging around home while her parents are away vacationing, and Maru getting that weird "daddy's little girl" vibe from her father about wanting to ensure a good future for her, which kind of paints her as being not yet a full adult capable of making her own decisions, even if that's just HIS perspective. I know she works part-time for Harvey, but I'm not certain that she's a fully certified nurse and still feels like early college-age, to me. Emily and Penny I could see possibly being a little older, given that they have regular jobs with some semblance of responsibility in their lives, although Penny is best friends with and canonically partnered with Sam who seems to be the absolute youngest of everyone, so she may only be in her early 20's herself, and with Emily being Haley's older sister that may only put her in her mid-20's. Whereas Leah is literally the only one living independently, and the only one who seems to have had any kind of serious adult life experience before you arrive in town, thus making her the only one I could imagine as being in her late 20's or early 30's. At least with the bachelors you get characters like Harvey, Shane, and Elliott who even the game states to be in that "older" age range, what with Harvey being a doctor running his own practice, Shane working a full-time job and having a perpetual five o'clock shadow, and Elliott living on his own after moving to Stardew Valley to seek inspiration in his writing career. But for the women, Leah and maayybee Emily are the only options, which I find extremely limiting when trying to pick an age-appropriate partner for my character. 

If some of the existing date-able characters couldn't have been made to be explicitly older, then it makes me wonder why you can't date any of the older singles around town. Marnie and Gus, for example, seem like wonderful people who would make great partners for a farmer, and someone like Willy might be a decent candidate as well. But I guess with all of these people running their own businesses and serving as shopkeepers, that might create a structural issue with the game's formatting if they had to leave their jobs to go live on the farm, or else spent all their time running their stores instead of enjoying married life with you, so I don't know. This is where mods like Ridgeside Village or Stardew Valley Expanded start really appealing to me, if only for the sake of having a few older dating options, because the ones in the vanilla game don't feel like they're really for me. 

Finally, I feel like some of the festivals are a little anticlimactic. Now don't get me wrong, I love the festivals for the way they add extra seasonal charm to each season, and the way they depict the sense of community with everyone coming together for each of these events, with many of the local townsfolk pitching in in their own special way to make it happen. I previously sang the praises of the Night Market and the Dance of the Moonlight Jellies, but most of the others have a similarly engaging vibe that really sells the time of the year in their presentation. It's just that, some of them seem to come and go without much of an exciting climax, or an actual resolution to the event. The Spirit's Eve Festival has some great atmosphere and even a fun little maze to explore, even if it is a little simple, but after you solve the maze, you just kind of leave without any fanfare or resolution, which I always thought was a little awkward. The Flower Dance likewise just kind of happens, with absolutely no follow-up to the cutscene in which you either witness or participate in the dance; like, there's no sequence where they crown a Flower Queen, or where you get a brief line of dialogue from your dance partner saying "Boy that was fun, thanks for dancing with me!" or anything like that. The dance just ends, and then you go home. Even participating in the dance itself is kind of underwhelming as it's just a short little cutscene where you don't do anything to actually participate in the dance yourself, like needing to time button prompts to dance in rhythm with the group without making a mistake, or needing to follow the others' movements and facing without breaking formation or bumping into anyone, which might've made it a little more fun and engaging.
 
The Feast of the Winter Star is the worst offender. The whole point is that it's the FEAST of the Winter Star, with tables of food set up everywhere, but you never get to sit down and participate in the titular feast. This event really should give you the option to pick which table to sit at as the conclusion to the event, which might raise your friendship points with everyone at that table by a small amount, possibly with you even bringing a dish of your own to share, and then play out a cutscene where Lewis or someone gives a toast for the great year you've all just had while wishing the Winter Star's blessings on everyone for the next year, before everyone digs into the feast, and then fading to black to end the event. But instead you just show up, exchange your gifts, and then awkwardly leave. It's the most anticlimactic thing ever. And there's not even any motion happening in the scene, everyone just stands there staring off into the distance like lifeless zombies. Why is no one walking around mingling between different groups of people, or admiring the decorations, or checking out all the presents under the tree, or sampling different foodstuffs from the tables?

And why are we even having this festival outside in the cold? That food is not going to stay warm very long in this weather, why are we not having it in Pierre and Caroline's recreation room. Or what about the Saloon? Could we clear a spot in the museum for this one event? How big is the top floor of the spa that we can never go to, is there enough room for the event there? Or what about the community center that I put all that effort into restoring? For that matter, why don't ANY of the events make use of the community center after it's restored? That seems like another missed opportunity to make it have more of a rewarding impact, if some of the events could be moved inside, or if there were a new seasonal event that gets added to the calendar every year, like a "Community Day" where everyone gets together for a talent show or something. I suppose the issue with putting festivals in the Community Center is having to create multiple different scenarios to account for players who sided with Jojamart, in which case it might be a warehouse or a movie theater instead, but it's still a little disappointing that the Community Center doesn't get used for any major purpose after it's restored. It's cool that you do actually see people using it from time to time, but I just wish it served a more practical, interactive purpose in the gameplay for the actual player once it's restored.

At least with version 1.6, we finally get a second, alternate version of each festival that rotates in every other year, so there's at least some variety to experience with the festivals from year to year. Previously, you would've experienced the exact same scenario year after year, with the exact same map arrangements, the same lines of dialogue from all the NPC's, and the same gameplay solutions to everything. This made repeat festivals especially underwhelming during my previous playthrough of version 1.5 about a year ago, when there wasn't much incentive to even show up for the festivals after the first year. So I'm glad this has finally been addressed with the recent update, but it's still a shame that it took seven years since the game first launched for it to happen, as the repetitive festivals definitely would've been a major criticism if I were still playing and reviewing the earlier versions of the game. There's kind of a similar thing going on with the characters' outfits, where for the longest time everyone only had one outfit they wore throughout the entire year, which led to absurd moments where people like Haley are hanging out in the snow while wearing a sundress, or with Demetrius wearing a short sleeve shirt at an ice fishing competition talking about how he should've worn a coat. That's another thing that finally got addressed with 1.6, in giving everyone an alternate set of winter clothes, for which I will commend the improvement but lament that it took seven years for them to finally start wearing hats and coats in the winter.
 
So Stardew Valley wound up being a surprise hit for me. Although I did enjoy playing some of the Harvest Moon games back in the day, I had grown away from this type of gameplay experience over the last 20-some years, and thus the idea of playing another "country life simulator" never really appealed to me. I then randomly decided to spend some Google Play credits to try out the mobile version, figuring it might be a decent way to kill time while away from home, and hey, if I wind up not liking it at least I'm not spending my own money on it. But after the first week or so of in-game time, I found myself deeply engrossed in the process of exploring the town, getting to know all the townsfolk, upgrading my farm, and looking forward to what each new season had to offer. The game's best selling point, in my opinion, is truly just its charming, immersive premise, and its relaxing vibes and atmosphere, but then it also has really engaging gameplay mechanics with tons of depth and variety to experience and a really satisfying progression system to go along with that wonderful theme. And the fact that it's made entirely by a one-man development team, who goes by the moniker ConcernedApe, makes it all the more impressive and worthy of praise. This game really does feel like a labor of love from the developer, with a lot of smart ideas and simple heart injected into its creation, which is reinforced by all the continued support he's given Stardew Valley over the last eight years with so many free content updates that continue to expand on the game and make everything better, without charging any extra money in the form of DLC or microtransactions. The theme and gameplay systems may not be for everyone, but it's no wonder to me why Stardew Valley appeals to so many people so strongly, because it really is just an extremely lovable game. In my case, I didn't feel like I had any particular affinity for this type of game going into it, but it quickly won me over and has become one of my most cherished gaming experiences.