Stardew Valley Review

By Kevin Tavore,

Stardew Valley is a game about a life that you have never lived. With almost nothing to your name but a few tools and a bit of gold, you’ll begin on a farm that was given to you by your grandfather. The land that you hold is large but is overridden by boulders, trees, and weeds. As any good farmer would, your first task is to get to work and create plots on which you can begin sowing seeds to grow crops. As you work, you use valuable energy and eventually turn to bed before you wake up again bright and early.

Each day you’ll give yourself a set of goals to complete — water the crops, chop these trees, fish to make some valuable gold. Whether you’re done or not, energy will run out and night will come. As you work, days will turn into weeks, seasons, and years. You’ll grow your farm into an empire, fight monsters in the mines, and even find a loving bride. You’ll do it all in a life that you never lived but maybe you’ll wish you had.

Stardew Valley's bread and butter is the farming. At a basic level, it's very simple. Get the land ready, use some fertilizer, plant seeds, and water every day until it's time to pick the plants. Different plants grow in different seasons so a variety is important, but farming itself is easy — the challenge comes from planning. What kind of crops will you want to maximize your profits? Is it better to invest in making jellies and other artisan products or to sell the raw crops for instant gold? As your farm grows, you'll also need to decide whether or not it's worth investing in livestock. This planning is the core of what makes the game so much fun. It feels rewarding to make a plan and work towards it over weeks, or even seasons, and to have it pay off.

There are other activities, too. Fishing is a great way to make money when you're first starting out and have a ton of energy. Fish are moderately valuable and there's not much else to spend your days doing other than exploring the mine. The mine is full of enemies and you'll need to engage in combat as you make your way through. You'll start with a rusty sword but find better weapons as you progress. Beyond these, you'll also need to spend quite a bit of time working to expand your usable land, which is initially filled with rubble, trees, and weeds. You can do any of these things in a day, but you can't do all of them.

Nearly every action that you take costs energy. While you can eat crops or even prepare meals to increase your energy, at some point you're just going to need to retire for the day. If you work too hard, you'll become exhausted and that means half energy the next day — a disaster if you've got a lot of chores to do in the morning. This energy mechanic could be annoying, but it ends up making the game more fun. The plans that you make are actually important and if you're ever unsure of what to do on a given day, villagers will shower you with quests that you can complete for a small reward. There's always more things to do than you have time and energy to accomplish.

With proper planning, the experience is fantastic. Your first Spring will be easy as you have very little money with which to work. By your first Fall, you'll likely have a large amount of crops to water each day, which will take a huge portion of your energy. Luckily, you'll be working through the mine for resources and can make sprinklers or upgrade your tools to make things a bit easier. Eventually you'll have animals, huge plots of farmable land, and an orchard, yet there will still feel like there's more to do as you explore the town and see all that Stardew Valley has to offer. Every day you'll move a bit closer to your goals. The sense of progression was simply wonderful and it's what keeps you coming back. Just one more day.

Sadly, not every element of the game is so well done. The combat in the mines is not the central focus of the game, but every fight revolves around knocking an enemy into a wall over and over until they die. The enemies do different things so you can tell that the developer tried to make things interesting, but in the end it's too simple. Fishing is also a one note experience. There are different fish in different places, and even quite a few legendary fish to catch, but fishing quickly devolves into just hitting

over and over. Neither fishing nor combat is particularly bad, but they won't keep you coming back every day like managing your farm does.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is the town of Pelican Town itself. It's full of 28 different characters with their own routines that change on different days and seasons. The game has a relationship system where you're encouraged to become friends with the villagers, but it simply isn't very interesting. You gain hearts with the villagers primarily by giving them gifts. You'd think that talking to them would help, but it really isn't necessary. Villagers lose a small amount of points for each day that you don't talk to them, but the gifts that you give will easily outweigh this decrease so that it doesn't matter. Villagers will gift you items in the mail if they like you and it's required to build a relationship with the person that you hope to marry and have children, but otherwise there's not much incentive to make friends with anyone and doing so isn't very fun. The only interesting thing that the village ever does is the occasional festival, which always spices things up with a minigame or contest. The festivals are enjoyable, but the game needed more than just those to really flesh out the friendly faces that you'll meet.

Visually the game is really quite good and the pixel art style really works. In older games, the pixels were a limitation of the systems, which meant that animations were also limited. In Stardew Valley, there are many unique animations. Additionally, the environment and color palette changes throughout the seasons, which helps to eep things fresh when you're not looking at the same things over and over again. The visuals come together to form an aesthetic that works for the game in a pleasant way.

The game does have some performance issues. I encountered many frame drops and the game would even freeze for a few seconds at a time. Even worse, occasionally the game would simply crash while walking around or sleeping. As I wrote this review, a new glitch has appeared thanks to a patch that crashes the game whenever I walk near the middle of my farm. The developer is communicative and promises to fix all of the bugs as soon as possible, but they are there and you can't expect a hassle-free experience. That said, whenever the game crashed I was always excited to jump right back in and repeat the day, so the bugs weren't so great that they ruined the game.

If you're here for the achievements, it's going to be a long journey. You'll need to experience everything that the game has to offer, from earning a huge sum of gold to catching every fish. You'll need to reach the lowest level of the mines and restore the town community center while also managing your relationships to become best friends with many villagers and get married and have children. Overall, I'm sure that this list will take an average player well over 100 hours. Even with a guide, some of the achievements will require RNG drops and one requires a second playthrough.

Summary

Stardew Valley is a unique game for consoles that you didn't realize that you wanted until you had it. Growing your farm from a small plot of land to a massive industry is a wonderful feeling and the journey is rewarding and worthy of your time. You'll constantly be thinking of new ventures that you can try to make gold; with proper work, those ventures always pay off, which only makes you want to play even more. With plenty of extra activities in which to participate throughout your days, you won't grow bored quickly. While the game isn't perfect — side activities can be dull and there are a few frustrating bugs — Stardew Valley will no doubt remain a staple in my rotation for months to come. It's a game that fully succeeds in its premise and for that it is worthy of your time.

Positives

Growing your farm is rewarding and fun
Variety of tasks each day means that you won't get bored
Beautiful aesthetics
Sense of progression is nearly unmatched

Negatives

Occasional frustrating glitches and crashes
Pelican town's villagers aren't interesting
Side activities can be dull after a while

Ethics

The reviewer spent approximately 16 hours farming, fighting, fishing, socializing and making the best jellies around, earning 5 of the 40 available achievements along the way. An Xbox One copy of the game was provided by the publisher for this review.

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Written by Kevin Tavore

Kevin is a lover of all types of media, especially any type of long form story. The American equivalent of Aristotle, he'll write about anything and everything and you'll usually see him as the purveyor of news, reviews and the occasional op-ed. He's happy with any game that's not point and click or puzzling, but would always rather be outdoors in nature.