Stardew Valley is a game about farming. You inherit your Grandpa's farm, and it's just a plot of land with a bunch of trees and rocks and weeds, and it's your job to plant crops and water the crops and pick the crops and sell the crops. Are you enthralled yet?
So the first little bit you're just trying to clear the land and get things to growing. Everything is on a daily cycle, so you get up at the butt crack of dawn, and you're forced to go the fuck to sleep by 1 AM. If you aren't snuggled nicely in your bed by then, you collapse from exhaustion and some kindly hermit is kind enough to take your dumb ass to the hospital. You get a hefty hospital bill and lose some progress as a result of your poor life choices. I was mining when it happened to me, so the progress lost was I forgot the last several levels of the mine and had to explore them again.
So yes, I jumped ahead. There's farming, but there's also a great big world where you can mine for ore, go fishing, collect artifacts, raise livestock, etc. etc. Are you enthralled yet?
What's the point of all this, you may ask. Well, the thing that kept me playing for ages was there's this old community center that's dilapidated. In each room of the community center, there's a list of items for you to collect to form different bundles. An example of a bundle would be the Spring Crops Bundle, which requires you provide a parsnip, green bean, cauliflower, and a potato. Providing all the items of a bundle gets you a little reward (fertilizer, for example). Completing all 5 bundles in a room will get you a larger reward, like fixing a bridge that opens up a new area. What happens when all the bundles are collected wasn't explicitly stated, but that mission was enough to sell me.
In order to collect all the items necessary, the player needs to toil day after day through spring, summer, fall, and winter, harvesting season specific crops when the opportunity is there. I say toil, but there was something enjoyable about getting up each day and performing a routine of watering the crops and milking the cows. After all my chores of the day were done, I would generally head into town. The general store has a job board where townspeople routinely put requests. These requests are generally to bring them items you can grow, forage, or create. Why do these quests? A. Money. B. There's a heart system where doing things for people in the town, talking to them, and giving them gifts they like will bump up the number of hearts in your friendship meter. The more hearts you gain, the less they treat you like some asshole stranger. "Heart events" will also be triggered when you reach a certain heart threshold and see the person again. These events give you a little more insight to who they are, what they like, what's their life like, and whatnot. They're short little stories, but it was a pleasant surprise each time I triggered one.
There are a number of townsfolk who are marked as single and when you have maxed out your friendship meter with them, you can ask them to be your boyfran or girlfran and eventually do the marriage dance and can have kids and such. I ended up choosing the guy who may have a drinking problem and was a real douchebag in initial whatups. #whatdoesthatsayaboutme lol I got to max heart level with him first because I kept giving him gifts (mostly beer #enabler) to see at what point he would stop being a douchebag. Through the heart events you learn he hates his job and feels stuck, blah blah blah. You can do farm stuff instead. I will save you from your cycle of hating life and then killing your feelings with alcohol. #whatdoesthatsayaboutme
Anyway, so seasons pass. I collect things. I have new buildings built, I get chickens and ducks and sheep and pigs, plant fruit trees, and make wine, and then build a cellar to age the shit out of that wine, give gifts to all of the townspeople and make everyone think I am the best at stuff. I do this for a bajillion hours, until at one point, as I seem to do with all games, I think, "Okay, I'm fucking over this." What is my end goal? I want to collect all those damn bundles, and I only need a rabbit foot and a pomegranate to do it.
I have rabbits, but the rabbits have to reeeeaaaalllly like you to start dropping feet. I kept consulting the internet to see if I had to sell the rabbits or kill the rabbits to get the feet because you know, that makes logical sense. Nah. You just gotta wait the little bastards out, and they'll start dropping them like chickens and their eggs. It made no sense, but was happy because I didn't want to kill Bugs, Buster, or Babs. (Yes, you get to name all your livestock.)
So with the rabbit's foot in hand, I just need a pomegranate. Oh woe is me, the idiot who first thought she planted a pomegranate sapling then realizes she didn't, then proceeds to put torches around the one she does plant, which unbeknownst to her was preventing the tree from growing. (They need 6 clear spaces around them to grow.) Days had passed wasted where this fucker could have been growing. Thinking this was some sort of bug and not realizing that I had stunted the growth, I plant another pomegranate tree. They take 28 days to mature and they produce fruit in the fall. The point at which I was over playing this game was early Spring. Oh bother...
So thus begins the steady decline of my farm. I just needed to get to the 1st of Fall then I could be done. The quickest way to do that is to sleep the days away. I stopped planting new crops or collecting anything that was being created. I would wake up say whatup to the husband, whatup to the kid, check the mail, and go back to bed. 6:30AM: "Good night. Mommy has postpartum depression." Every few days I would go say hey to the cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks, and bunnies, make sure they had enough food, and that their status was "is fine" and go back to my slumber. I didn't even pick up the chicken eggs until they kept me from reaching one of them to check if they were grumpy or not. The only days that ended slightly later were Fridays and Sundays because on those days, there was a traveling cart that shows up with a 1.26% chance of having a pomegranate for sale, and I had to go check.
It never did.
I proceed in this manner for 50+ game days. I feel slightly bad about it but soldier on until glorious fall arrives, with a fresh pomegranate on the tree. I take it to the community center and the building is restored in its entirety. I feel accomplished.
Until I realize that I didn't get my fucking achievement for completing it. No satisfying event is triggered. The last bundle was just like every other fucking bundle. That can't be right, I think. To the internet I go, where they say I need to wait a few more days for an event to trigger.
So I do. It's 2:30AM (in real life) by this point, and I just want to be done.
It took 4 more days of my depression sleep cycle, but there it was...the community center in its former glory, all the townspeople enjoying it. Joja-Mart all pissed off because they wanted to demolish it and make a warehouse. I failed to mention Jojamart before. It's an evil corporation. We hate them. That's all you need to know. Take that, evil corporation. And with that...and one more inconsequential quest, I deem Stardew Valley complete.
Despite my grind at the end, I REALLY liked Stardew Valley. I was obsessed with playing this thing for daaaaaaays. I was embarrassed by how much I was playing that I got in the habit of marking myself as Offline on Steam so people wouldn't see how much time I was sinking into this game.
If you enjoyed Harvest Moon, you'll like this. And just as an interesting note about the game, this game was the work of ONE person, which is amazing! It was a 4 year labor of love BY ONE GUY. That blows my mind and is pretty inspiring. Go buy it. It's $15 bucks. Fucking do it.
