Stardew Valley is a 2016 cozy farming and relationship game developed by ConcernedApe. It’s heavily inspired by Harvest Moon games. In the game, player takes on a role of a burnt out worker who leaves their 9-to-5 job at the evil Joja Corp, move to a farm they inherited from their grandpa and start building a farm and getting to know people in the town.
At the time of writing, I have over 1100 hours recorded in Steam for this game. The game has a way to keep you in its grasp once you fall in. The game operates on a daily cycle: you wake up at 6 am and need to be in bed by 2am, and that cycle defines the gameplay and why it’s so addictive.
In the beginning, you run out of time and energy constantly but as the game progresses, it starts to become less and less relevant. However, each day you’ll get enough done to keep you engaged but not enough for there to be an easy cut off point to stop playing. If you reach your goals by the end of a day, getting the rewards of your hard work takes only a small amount of the day so you’ll always start working towards the next thing. As the game only saves when you sleep, you’re always in the middle of something.
In addition to day cycles, the game is divided into 4 seasons with 28 days on each season. Spring, summer, fall and winter all have their unique crops to grow and fish to catch. You will explore new things as you play. One beautiful thing about the game is that pretty much nothing is missed forever or have negative effects if you don’t do them. The only downside is that you might have to wait until the next year to get another opportunity.
The game also has a great support for modding and the community has built some absolutely amazing mods. There are aesthetic mods that change how the game looks, functional mods with a ton of quality of life improvements and best of all, story mods that add new locations, characters, challenges that breath new fresh air to the game between its official updates. Oh yes, the game still receives free updates even after 10 years. 1.5 and the current 1.6 update added a ton of new story elements and entire new regions to the late game. It’s quite remarkable how a game that cost a few euros still gets this much great content a decade later.