Stardew Valley review: A pastoral, contemporary escape

Simulation games have always felt lonely to me, almost empty. For all of their enticements, their promises of endless adventure, they invariably fall short. Somewhere, somehow, something breaks the immersion, laying bare the machinery behind the curtains. It’s never the virtual life advertised, just a simulacrum of a dream.

So, when the first mentions of farm-life simulator Stardew Valley bloomed on Twitter, I raised an eyebrow. It’s been described as Harvest Moon crossed with Animal Crossing and Zelda, a love letter to the pastoral classics. But I’d been there, done that, and while I adored my time with Starbound—my last farming-type flirtation—it left me feeling as though I was a child with a diorama of talking action figures, rather than an extraterrestrial colony leader.

Nonetheless, circumstances led to the acquisition of the game, and I went ahead with it, sceptical at first, only to become completely infatuated by the end of the first growing season. Where other titles barrage you with features, with new twists, and new iterations on the latest big new idea, Stardew Valley asks you, both as your pixelated avatar and as the player, to breathe.

Just breathe.

There’s a stillness to the game that stands in sharp contradiction to everything modern life represents: limited television channels, inescapable busywork, relationships that must be cultivated through careful attention instead of half-hearted check-ins on social media prompted by a carousel of birthday notifications and someone else’s likes.

In a curious way, Stardew Valley also defies the trajectory of the games industry at large. It isn’t helmed by a large team, or even an experienced team that has been whetted on the grinding stone of triple-A production. It is feature-complete, publisher-supported, and absent of buzz words. It is a homage that wears its influences on its sleeve, while being simultaneously conscious of its predecessors’ inadequacies. In a time of crowdfunding and virtual reality and Early Access, Stardew Valley feels like the escape, a throwback to a simpler era, a motif that it reinforces through a variety of cutscenes.

Stardew Valley shares the same basic premise as Harvest Moon. An older relative has left a farm in your care. You step up to the plate. But where Harvest Moon left your motivations relatively ambiguous, Stardew Valley opts for a more contemporary explanation. Your character is tired of the rat race, tired of being pummelled by the menial nature of cosmopolitan life, so he or she leaves for the country, discovering a run-down farm house and an overgrown plot of land on arrival. I don’t know if that was intentional, but it feels both like a nod towards the plight of the cubicle worker, and a reminder that the grass is never greener on the other side.

The bulk of the game revolves around precisely what you’d expect: figuring out how to manage a profitable, viable farm. Almost immediately, you’re thrust into the grind. There is land to till, seeds to sow, plants to water, and produce to harvest. It’s achingly slow at first, even laborious. For such a sweet-looking game, Stardew Valley isn’t afraid of making you get your hands dirty. Slowly, however, things open up. You’re made aware of options, opportunities, events that might benefit from your presence. You meet people, a cluster of sometimes rural-seeming townsfolk, who keep their bedrooms locked from strangers, but are more than willing to open their front doors to you.

If you’ve played Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing or, really, any of the other games that fit that loose category, there’s likely something in Stardew Valley that you’ve seen before. But you know how they say that it’s the people that matter? That’s especially true here. I wasn’t particularly impressed with Stardew Valley, at first. The locals were pleasant, sure, but they were also reminiscent of every anime stereotype I’d ever seen.

The grumpy old man. The narcissistic blonde. The football jock. They were all there, spouting the non-sequiturs that you’d expect of them, living the lives you’d expect. But slowly, slowly, Stardew Valley reveals that it was just an act of misdirection, and it is far more layered an experience than I initially thought.

By sheer circumstance, I found myself in the local tavern one night, where people were mingling and relaxing after a week’s toil. I clicked through the mass of familiar faces, naturally, collecting distracted responses. No one was terribly interested in the newcomer. The only thing of interest was the relationship between the mayor and a woman named Marnie, who seemed completely riveted by the rather nice old man. I smiled, left. There was nothing left to do.

But then a surprisingly poignant cutscene followed, and it caught me off-guard: Linus, the homeless man who lived in a tent near the carpenter’s house, was rifling through the surly geriatric’s garbage. He narrowly escapes discovery, but I’m asked to “scare off the raccoons.” So, I go around the corner and confront Linus, and decide to tell him that what he’s doing is not right, expecting agreement or a comedic sequence. It doesn’t come. Instead, he flinches and acquiesces, moves away, leaving me feeling ill with my decision. I’d approached Linus as a character, and he responded as a person.

It’s then that I start taking notice of my environment and paying attention to the details. When the mayor asks that I discreetly locate his missing shorts, I find my way to Marnie’s. Sure enough, the missing underpants are sequestered in her bedroom. The game is rife with tiny details like this, so many of which I’m still untangling from the veneer of normalcy. Nonetheless, what really got to me, though, was none of this was immediately available. Like the endless harvest, it needed attention, care, and scrutiny. It is, for lack of a better word, weirdly refreshing.

NPCs, for all their textural complexities and intricate dialogue trees, often feel like actors hired for a specific reason, omnipresent but devoid of personal agency. The people of Stardew Valley are not like that. Despite the constraints of the game, there’s a genuine sense of presence to the characters. They have their own daily routines and implied lives, their own moments of perfect quiet. It’s the last that sets them apart. It is so rare to have characters just sitting there, doing nothing but luxuriating in their own silence, devoid of narrative purpose. More interestingly, maybe, is the fact that they will make you wait in the silence with them too.