Stardew Valley is a quiet little town where nothing ever changes besides the seasons, and if you want to be accepted by the community you’ll shut up and never question it again. My main goal was to infiltrate this cult and become one of them so that I would finally have a community that accepts me! The beginning of the game starts with the player receiving a letter from their dying grandfather granting them ownership of their farm, but they’re only allowed to open the letter after they have been broken by modern life. A little cutscene shows the player created character being bored out of their skull in their work cubicle. With their spirit sufficiently crushed, they tear open the letter their grandpa left and automatically quit their job, leaving for farm life. This is where our game starts.
You take a bus to the secluded town and are greeted by local carpenter and mom, Robin. She shows you to your grandpa’s house where it turns out the mayor, Lewis, has apparently been squatting because he bursts out. Not really, he was just making sure it was safe inside and even left you a little gift to get started growing crops. They leave you alone and the player decides to rest after spending the day with all the smelly and gross people on the bus. That was a sentence that will surely alienate all none of my smelly and gross bus-riding readers.
The game starts you with very little energy (represented by a green bar). So after you plant your first few parsnip seeds (provided by Mayor Lewis), the only thing left to do is go meet everyone in town and there are a lot of people to meet. 36 to be exact so I’m just gonna go over the highlights (also known as the people that actually matter).
Pierre runs the local store and his wife, Caroline, runs the exercise class. He’s been struggling to make ends meet ever since a supermarket opened up. Why a supermarket opened up in Stardew Valley where there are very little shoppers, I have no idea. I exclusively shop at Pierre’s because I can relate to having money problems and because I want to marry his daughter so it’ll be good to secure his blessing down the line.
The Wizard is Abigail’s actual father because Caroline had an affair with him. It’s never explicitly stated but based on context clues you can assume. In Abigail’s trivia page, it’s stated, “After a sufficient relationship is built up, Pierre will confess that he worries that Abigail is not his biological daughter. Later, the Wizard will mention that he has reason to believe one of the townsfolk is his daughter. At one point Caroline will mention that she used to take secret walks to the Wizard’s tower.” But that’s not why the wizard is important, he’s important because he gives the main character the ability to understand the junimos. Then you can ignore him for the rest of the game.
Robin is the local carpenter. Pay her, provide material, and she’ll build you stuff like a better house or buildings to keep your animals in.
Marnie sells animals on her ranch. For some reason, rabbits are included with the egg laying animals she sells but whatever. One day I’ll get the elusive rabbit egg.
Mayor Lewis is the mayor, he’s having a secret relationship with Marnie who runs the ranch. I don’t know why they keep it secret since they’re both old and single and do a really poor job of hiding it but whatever. Let the old fogies have their fun. The most important thing Lewis does is open the old ruined Community Center, which is now inhabited by magical creatures called junimos , to the player so he can solve the town’s problem of restoring it themselves. It’s a very slow process and takes at least one in-game year before it can be completed due to needing every seasonal crop.
Willy teaches you to fish, Gus runs a saloon, and Linus is the town bum. And that’s really everyone who matters. That was a lot shorter list than I realized. Well, moving on.
My second experience of playing this game was a lot worse than my first and not just because I chose to play the Nintendo Switch Port. I made much worse progress and the townspeople always hated me for digging through the trash for stuff to give them. Bunch of ungrateful jerks, don’t they know one man’s trash is another’s treasure? I was just saving them a step.
It wasn’t a good time, I eventually fixed the community center and I was recognized as one of them as the supermarket went out of business but I was still empty. I wanted out. So I tried having the player character get torn apart by monsters, collapse from exhaustion, get hit by a train, catch pneumonia by standing in the rain for 16 hours. But nothing worked, Harvey the doctor would always be there to save me. And that’s when I realized. There is no escaping Stardew Valley. Because there is no escaping Hell.
Somehow Metacritic gave this game an 89%.
I made a video on this game, viewable by clicking here.
RatedB 