Stardew Valley
Platform: PC/Steam
Developer: Concerned Ape
Premise: After acquiring your grandfather's old farm in Stardew Valley, you are handed a large plot filled with weeds and told that if you have any intention of doing anything with the actual farm, you should probably make sure there isn't a patch of weeds here tomorrow.
Release Date: 27/02/2016
A.N. For those who didn't read the last post, I'll get you up to speed: last week's post disappeared into the ether due to the fact that I was in Tasmania on camp, so this is the second part of a double-update to make up for it. In addition, the Overwatch Public Beta dropped recently, so expect some Let's Play/Highlights type content coming from me on that in the near future. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Stardew Valley is a farming sim that basically plays as a slightly more advanced version of Farmville, except without having to pay micro-transactions or deal with actual people. There are a lot of things I don't like about Stardew Valley. The movement speed feels a bit too slow even while sprinting, the in-game time goes by way too fast to get much substantial work done in a day, NPC shopkeepers occasionally get the urge to go out and see the world (during which time you cannot buy or sell things to them, which wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the shops are only open for certain time windows), and your characters energy wears down a lot faster than it should, and doesn't regenerate.
All that being said, it's got to be doing something right because in the four days after getting it I somehow managed to rack up 12 sodding hours of playtime. For all the little things that start to rub me up the wrong way like a pair of bathers filled with sand, there's still something terribly relaxing about falling into your little routine, watering crops and occasionally delivering specific items to NPCs to complete little fetch-quests.
However, before we go on to the positives, I'd like to get one other negative thing out of the way first: Stardew Valley has a plot. And frankly, after an embarrassing amount of playtime, that's about all I'm capable of stating with complete confidence. There's something about weird creatures taking over the old community center, and there's something shady going on with the company you quit working for before going to the valley, but it's not entirely clear where it's going or what's supposed to be happening so it just sort of hangs over the rest of the game like an eggy fart.
That being said, let's go back to the more positive side of it: It's relaxing, provided you're the kind of gamer who can bring themselves to enjoy a game that doesn't involve shooting at things. The soundtrack's decent, and helps to improve the setting of "Town stuck almost permanently in Lazy-Sunday-Afternoon mode", although you will want to keep handy something to bite down on for the first time a crow makes off with a crop that was 1 day away from being ready to flog to the general store.
At the end of the day, Stardew Valley is a fun way to pass the time, until you start to fall into the game's routine in favour of other parts of your routine, like work, sleep, or food. Outside of the tendency for addiction and losing track of real-world time, I wholeheartedly recommend picking it up at some stage.
As always, anyone who has a suggestion for a review, rant topic, or just wants to say "hi!", can do so by emailing me at pressxtoreview@gmail.com
-Harry
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