stardew valley
Stardew Valley is a game about farming, and dating, and mining and friendship. It begins with a letter from your Grandfather saying he's left his farm to you in his will. You leave your desk job in the city and move to the countryside. The farm is a run down mess. It's up to you what you do with it. It's about leaving the city behind and finding pleasure in the simple life of the soil. There's a nice metanarrative to this in that after a hard day at the office I do go and play on my farm and chill out. And things are simpler. On my farm, I have a beautiful wife: she has long red hair and likes the outdoors and makes sculptures, we’re very much in love and have two adopted children. (In a welcome update on the old farming sims: all the datable characters in town are bisexual and you can play as either male or female - progress!) My farm is well organised with a healthy crop of plants and animals - the money is rolling in. It’s a very sweet set up.
Day-to-day I have a routine: mornings are for watering my crops, tending to my animals, and a bit of farm maintenance then the afternoon is for exploring town, a spot of fishing, talking to villages (I’m trying to be friends with Emily at the moment. For no explained reason she likes quartz so I give her a bit now and then and we chat. She has a little parrot, it’s nice) Or I might descend into the mines, fight a few monsters and come away with some precious ores to upgrade my tools back on the farm. It’s a simple mechanic borrowed from RPGs, every action you do levels up the player, there is a crafting page to make better equipment which allows you to sell your produce for more money or make your farming life easier. You can build chicken coops and buy a horse. It's a bit of Harvest Moon (well a lot actually, a bit of Rune Factory and a healthy dash of Animal Crossing.
But in some ways Stardew Valley's game structure is backwards. Most games tend to get harder as they go along. Increasing the challenge and difficulty of the enemy types, puzzles or platforming levels, requiring the player to perform more complex moves. The player's skills and move/power/weapon set should also improve alongside this. It's a balance of the two that allows for the sweet zone called 'Flow' preventing players from getting bored by a lack of challenge (and therefore that delightful sense of achievement) and the game becoming so hard that it's frustrating and players put it down. One of the defining features of RPGs, in particular, is returning to an early area of the game, now levelled up, and being able to take out old enemies which once caused you grief in one swipe. It creates that sense of progress and achievement.
Stardew Valley and others like it, actually get easier as the games progress: you earn more energy so you can accomplish more tasks, you upgrade your tools so they cover more area, you can even make sprinklers to water your crops and automate animal feeding. Once you have the greenhouse you can grow a renewable lucrative crop that gives you all the money you need. The mines run counter to this in that they work like traditional RPG dungeons, each level holding harder monster which you need a better weapon and stats to defeat. But once you've reached a certain level, even the endless Skull Cave isn't much of a challenge with the right sword and a few bombs. The player can effectively break the game for themselves by min/maxing the game - in this case working out of the minimum work required for the maximum profit yield, removing all sense of challenge and reward. So why keep playing?
The story, I would argue is what hooks players who have already sunk more than 80+ hours of their real life (don't judge me) into this game. I'm attached to my farm and seeing it thrive, heck I'm proud of what I've created: the arrangement of barns and crops; my little family. The relationships I've built with the people in town, the stories of theirs I've yet to uncover (just one more piece of quartz gifted to Emily and maybe I'll find out what happened to her parents). I know from the wiki that there are areas I still haven't accessed, events that haven't yet triggered. And underpinned by it all is the diurnal cycle, and the annual one, the comforting routine I've established on my farm, repetitive tasks that eventually do breed reward. I have some vague long-term goals in sight: to grow every kind of crop, cook every kind of meal. Achievements only around 4% of players get. But really I'm just happy to clock out of my real life for a bit, and live a simpler, happier one on my farm where the sun shines and the grass grows and everyone in town thinks I'm a real neat gal, especially since I've finally renovated the community centre. There's a vague overarching narrative of the big corporation who you used to work for trying to take over the town, but you can choose to ignore it if you like. A lot of things in Stardew Valley are optional. It really does let you create the story that you want both in-game and in your own head.
Right, I'm off, I need to get up at 6 am to milk my cows and kiss my wife — those things don't just happen on their own you know, they take a lot of hard work.
Stardew Valley is out now on PC, Mac, PS4, XBOX ONE and Nintendo Switch
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