Farming games were popular for a while and I don’t mean the silly ones like Farmville but the more substantial ones like the Harvest Moon series. But the latter was mostly confined to console platforms for a long time so I never had a chance to try them. Eventually Stardew Valley appeared for the PC which I understand is a pretty typical clone of this style of game and so I bought it. But it still took me this long to get around to actually play it and by now of course no one cares about this genre any longer.

I’ve long since realized that I’m not cut out for the open-ended builder games which have few fixed goals and are mostly about the player exercising their creativity. The prime example of this type of game is of course Minecraft which I never really tried because I knew I wouldn’t like it. These farming games are less unconstrained than that and not about creativity at all. But it’s still about building up your own farm without much in the way of specific goals. Here you inherit a piece of land from a deceased grandfather and tired of the rat race in the city, decide to move to Stardew Valley to work on the farm. You start with a small house and land that is overgrown with weeds, scattered pieces of wood and rocks. It’s up to you to clear the land, plant seeds, water the plants everyday, harvest and save the money to expand your farm house and build more buildings. You’re also meant to make friends with the local community and perhaps eventually marry someone and start a family.

This type of game is pretty overwhelming at the beginning because of the sheer number of things to work on. Sure, you’re supposed to clear land and plant seeds, and you’re given a small stock of seeds to start with. But how big a land area do you need? As you chop up the branches, clear the weeds and break apart the stones, you end up collecting all kinds of resources but what are they are for and how much do you need? Soon enough you’ll see that your energy goes down with every swing of an axe and it starts to get dark and it’s a good idea to go back into your house to sleep before you fall asleep on your feet. There are so many game elements interacting in all kinds of ways. The game tries to slowly drip feed you the information you need through the television in your house but there’s a lot of it and some of it is kind of critical to know early. For example each season lasts 28 days and you need to take that into account when choosing which crops to plant. I tried to play this casually, taking things one day at a time without looking up facts online. But it’s just too much of a penalty to play that way as you do need to plan ahead, set goals for yourself and slowly work towards them.

You know about the saying of how there’s always too much work to do on the farm and not enough time to do everything? It’s at least partially true in this game. It’s up to you how big a plot of land you want to clear and actually cultivate. The more crops you grow the more time and energy you need to spend watering them and I never ended up using sprinklers. Later when you get animals you need to feed them and gather eggs from chicken, milk cows and so on. Then you may want to spend a little time putting milk into the cheese maker, putting grapes into kegs to make wine, etc. Between all this, you probably want to spend some time gathering wood and stone for farm upgrades, some fishing and gathering wild produce. Rainy days are good because then you don’t have to manually water your plants. I like to go into the mine and fight monsters on those days as you eventually want to make it all the way to the deepest level of the mine. Paying attention to the schedules of the villagers to talk and give them gifts to make friends takes time too. Before you know it, the day is gone and it’s off to bed.

At first I thought that the game was too repetitive and the goals, such as gathering 300 wood to repair a bridge, too impossibly far away. But I have to admit that the game grew on me as I accumulated more money, upgraded my tools and became more invested. I feel that trying to over-optimize everything isn’t in keeping with the spirit of the game but it’s still fun to age cheeses to get more value out of them, to equip a good tackle to try and land a particularly hard to catch fish, or to find the perfect gift for a villager on his or her birthday to max out the friendship gain. Even though you can play on and on indefinitely, you officially get graded at your performance after two years and it is possible to get a decent score without trying to mix-max everything. There are all kinds of little stories for each of the villagers and it’s great to see those play out. I’m sure that there are all kinds of secrets and extra challenges to be discovered for those who really want to spend a long time in this game. For example, I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be to catch a legendary fish or reach deep into Skull Cavern.

For my part I was happy to play for those two years. I kind of regret not looking things up earlier and so not realizing how the different seasons limit which crops are available to grow. This meant that I was never able to complete the Community Center bundles. I also need to make way more storage and not immediately sell everything. That would have made it easier to complete missions, gift things and craft things later. I never even realized that it was possible to let the animals out of the barn until way too late. It’s also extremely important to learn to read the simple graphics and discern which elements are background décor and which are useful information. For example ripples in the water indicate good fishing spots! I would be able to do so much better a second time around that replaying it actually tempting. Still as much as I enjoyed my time on this and it did take a whole lot more time than I expected, this is still not my preferred genre and so I’m unlikely to ever play anything like this again.