stardew valley game review

Stardew Valley: yet another niche game or masterpiece?

In many ways, Stardew Valley is a colossal anomaly in the video game world, whether independent or not. A tribute to the simulation of life on the farm, the work of a single developer who invested four years on this project, originally having no particular skills in the industry and even less participating directly or indirectly in development of a game, it is nevertheless one of the biggest successes of the year. Stardew Valley is one of the best-selling indie games in history, with over a million copies to date (in just two months), and an ever-growing community. And yet, nothing aimed this game at such an immense success: Eric Barone, its developer (ConcernedApe) originally wanted to simply refine his code skills to facilitate his job search ... his game is one of the best rated on Steam , one of the best-selling independents, and the success story of its creator may surprise: then, Stardew Valley, an already timeless masterpiece or yet another niche game?

Eric Barone has never hidden his love for the Harvest Moon series, and it is obvious that Stardew Valley borrows a lot of references from it. The first and most obvious is in the choice of the departure of the adventure: after creation of your avatar, you inherit the farm of your grandfather, and tired of the dreary life in the city, you leave for Pelican Town follow the life of a farmer.

ACCESSIBLE AND WELCOMING

Your first steps in Stardew Valley are marked by the discovery of your farm and the presentations of the inhabitants of the city: Craftsmen, possible marriage candidates or simple NPCs, and the places where they live. Very quickly, you easily immerse yourself in the rural world of the game, and the graphic choice of ConcernedApe (Super Nintendo style) reveals a multitude of details and possible options. We feel here a real freedom given to the player, in the direction towards which he wants to lead his life. No windy tutorial that takes a week (in-game time) as in many Harvest Moon; here the focus is on discovery and adventure. You will simply start the game with a farm in the most wild jumble, a handful of simple tools and about fifteen turnip seeds. From there, you are the only one who decides what you want to do. The presence of "quests" (we will rather speak of missions making you earn easy money at the start of the game and points of affection) does not really change or orient the game but rather seems to give occasional bonuses. On the other hand, despite a fairly large freedom, certain elements or places will remain blocked before a certain time, such as the mine or wild fishing, and building the animal stables can be a challenge.

Despite all this, Stardew Valley wants to be welcoming and accessible for everyone, even if nothing will hold your hand. We understand instinctively how the basics of gameplay work: using a hoe to plant its seeds, planting, watering, clearing fields, etc. The first days are especially marked by the start of the operation of your farm, and the cleaning of quantities of herbs, rocks and shrubs that have invaded it. The accumulation of resources such as stone and wood, among others, completes this, and fans of the genre will quickly take on the farm optimization game, to manage everything box by box. However, it was after the first season that the game revealed its full potential.

DEEP, DEMANDING BUT NEVER PAINFUL

This is undoubtedly the master stroke of Eric Barone and the feat of Stardew Valley: offering a truly rich and complete experience for a game of this style, without ever falling into the painful. Indeed, the main risk of agricultural simulations is the routine which is quickly installed. However, Stardew Valley offers a wide range of activities that will quickly break the monotony. There are many objects to collect, craft and collect over the seasons, time and activities: if only for fishing, there are dozens of fish to recover ... Then you can venture into the local mine: a random complex with each visit filled with monsters, traps, on more than a hundred levels, and each step allowing to collect rarer resources and to face tougher monsters. Yes, there are monsters in a Harvest Moon inspired game, as it would seem that Barone is also a fan of the Rune Factory (the "fantasy" spin off of the Harvest Moon series) and their usefulness is not really questionable.

The fact remains that each activity presented so far (agriculture, fishing, mining) is linked to skill levels, unlocking new crafts to make your daily life easier, from the most basic (the scarecrow scaring crows eaters seeds) to the rarest (replicator of valuable gems, large radius automatic watering can, etc.). This is what gives the game a real feeling of depth and progression. Your beginnings will be humble and marked by a careful management of your endurance (a gauge gradually emptying with each physical action) in order to be able to extend your farm and collect resources.

As your levels increase, your actions will consume less energy and your life will be facilitated by precise crafts: automatic watering cans on several boxes, fertilizers with various effects, better quality tools, etc. Craft is an essential component of the success of your farm! But despite the arrival of new workshops to transform your products and a feeling of satisfaction with each evolution or progression, the game seems to offer an endless suite of new things to discover or add to your farm, whose impressive size is a considerable asset.

We cannot talk about this quantity of workshops and products without mentioning the old community center and the Joja Market, the supermarket chain present in town. It is also the Joja Market which is the only "antagonist" of the game, since its aesthetics and the character of its leader makes this brand quite inhuman. Very early on, the player will have the choice between joining his loyalty program and unlocking with finance huge updates that can greatly facilitate your life on the farm (like the greenhouse, a portion of farm that operates year-round and allows grow anything in any season) by selling the community center in town. Or, you can help the spirits of the Forest to rebuild it by bringing more or less rare products, of good quality, and it will certainly take more time, in order to obtain these same updates.

Time to talk about it, because it is often lacking in the management of the farm, especially when it begins to spread! Water all your plants and take care of harvesting, maintaining the plants and then the animals can quickly torpedo you the whole day. You will then have to find the best way to optimize the time you are given to manage all of this. Going through quality automatic watering cans will quickly become compulsory, and taking plants that do not need to be replanted from the first harvest can be a huge time saver, especially if you want to use your products in the kitchen or with your tools (which you can create via craft or recover them via gifts from the spirits by helping to repair the center). Country life is not obviously easy every day and your management talents will be quickly called upon ... the changing seasons then bring a new list of things to do, plant, create, and ultimately, a sort of romantic melancholy gradually invades the player according to these actions, which shape his home.

A social experience over time

It's hard to talk about the game’s social mechanics without comparing them to its mentor, Harvest Moon. Where the original game was content to treat the relationships between the player of the NPC in a way quite naive even prude, Stardew Valley is more honest in its relations and even proposes characters with unsuspected depths. The only downside is how easy it is to bond: once you’ve discovered someone’s favorite product, just give it to them twice a week as a gift to advance their relationship. It is a little bit damaging despite everything, because we would have liked to discover the fights and deep aspirations of Linus, hermit living in a tent, despised by half the village and yet endowed with a great character and a big heart, other than by offering berries or products cooked by us.

However, to see these characters evolving around us at the same time as it is an integral part of the pleasure of the game. Becoming a friend is easy, but being their friend has a whole different meaning, and a really deep significance. Some choices add a challenge to your life as a farmer: would you like to start a family? getting married (rare thing, gay marriages are present in the game)? Are you going to help rebuild the local community center or will you leave it to the clutches of the large retailers (the only "enemy" of the game, who will remind you of why you left the city and its cold world)? In the end, the thirty people living in the village offer a quantity of events, a poignant experience and very different from the basic material. Despite this phenomenal amount of content, the game offers the luxury of being able to modify, and to receive regular updates and an additional content program such as a co-op mode.

Despite all the undeniable qualities mentioned so far, Stardew Valley has one or two faults: a clock that tends to run too fast given the myriad of activities to be accomplished, social mechanics not necessarily at the level of depth of writing of the characters, and a slight frustration at all that there is to do in the short time given. Despite this, Stardew Valley is a real breath of fresh air in the genre of agricultural simulation, because it is complete, deep at all levels (craft, farm, collection), because it addresses themes such as l he mass distribution industry faced with small village shops, the homeless, the war and its aftermath… we even wonder how such a game could have been made by one person! In addition, a community was formed with the development of the title, and offers many mods to amplify the gaming experience. We find more or less useful as the "bald" haircut, or an extension of the duration of a day - the typical day ending no later than two in the morning, begins at six, every ten minutes for seven seconds. Drawing on what made the success of the Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley offers itself the luxury of being inspired but also of surpassing its eldest, and of exceeding the limits which it had nevertheless imposed over the years. Much more than an inspired successor, Stardew Valley is the new benchmark of the genre, if not its new master.

The notes
+ Positive points
A successful gender mix with its own identity
Well-written characters
Plenty of secrets
A myriad of things to do to break the routine

Negative points
A sometimes frustrating clock in play
Social interactions still limited

A true small game of independent games, a tribute to the classics of life simulation, a mixture of modern and old, Stardew Valley represents an exceptional video game success story. The work and the passion are visible in the smallest detail and can only delight fans of the genre. Its content, its quality, and its community, make the game rightly one of the biggest successes of the moment, and yet, the bucolic and dreamy charm always takes effect with each update of the game.

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