You need to buy Stardew Valley on Steam. It’s only $20. It’s one of the all-time greatest PC games, with an incredible story.
I used to be extremely bookish, reading more than one book every week for 30+ years. Ten years ago I built a large library that has thousands of books. But computer games have mainly taken over. I’m down to just a few books a month. I love computer games!
It used to be different, but nowadays one mainly buys PC game online. I typically play a game for a bit, and then look for another contender on ratings sites like metacritics.com.
About two weeks ago I checked there and a new title, Stardew Valley, had rocketed to very near the top. The reviews were almost entirely favorable, so I spent $20 to get it.
Wow! It is genuinely one of the all-time great games! If you like computer games, you should not miss this. (Let me be sure to clarify I have no financial interest in the game and don’t know anybody associated with it. This is a neutral report.)
Stardew Valley is a miracle of sorts. It was created by ONE GUY named Eric Barone, who uses the nick Concerned Ape. He graduated college four years ago with a degree in computer science and couldn’t find a job. So he decided to hunker down and work on an original game, hoping to boost his skills with the dominant computer programming language C++.
He was living in a (no doubt crummy) apartment with his grad school girlfriend while working part-time as a theater ticket-taker. Suddenly he’s a multi-millionaire!
The game was released in mid-February and sold more than 500,000 copies in two weeks! It's the greatest Indie PC game release of all time (and the only rival is the independent development of the game Minecraft).
The developer, Eric Barone, did ALL of the coding, ALL of the writing, ALL of the graphics, and ALL of the sound! That’s a supernova of genius! It’s unprecedented! Big games like the Dragon Age series are very good, but they are a corporate mix of hundreds of contributors over multiple studios and office places with 16 levels of corporate committees. And they feel like that. Barone’s game is DIFFERENT and really wonderful. (I feel especially strongly about this because I tried almost the same thing myself, 20+ years ago, and failed, deciding after a point to make money right away through law practice. I’m VERY impressed by Barone and sorry I didn’t persevere myself so wonderfully. Of course, he’s much more talented than I am on the sound and graphics, although I was doing pretty good on the coding and the writing.)
So what’s the game about? On the surface, it’s a placid farm simulator, based on the old Super Nintendo game Harvest Moon. That part is solid and interesting and much fun.
But there’s also an incredibly interesting relationship system. There are 30 or more characters in your world. You can have all kinds of complex relationships with them. The writing is short but brilliant. Very soon you begin to see all characters as real people. You can woo 10 of them and have a marriage (including same-sex marriages). Then they help you at your farm, you can have kids, and much more.
There are hundreds of levels of dungeons. The combat is simple, cool, challenging, and an awful lot of fun.
There are deep crafting and cooking options.
There is a deep, leftie underlying plot. An evil Walmart-like corporation is trying to destroy local businesses. Eventually you can smite them.
Eric Barone is a principled vegetarian, so while you can have chickens, and pigs, and cows and other animals on your farm, you can’t slaughter them for meat. That’s an interesting game decision. (Incidentally, so far I’m playing as a pure farmer with no critters; my wife is going the critter route.)
A main gem of the game is the fishing option. It’s hard at first, but eventually you can make a fortune with a lot of fishing in the oceans, rivers, mines, etc. If you get good at it, you can also fish up treasure chests with incredible loot. This morning I caught a fishing chest with an INCREDIBLE weapon, three times better than what I’ve been using.
That’s just a small part of it. For $20 you really have to check this out. The music is incredibly good (I turn it off in almost all games) and the simple pixelated graphics are also very good. It’s an absolute masterpiece of a game.