Stardew Valley is a charming and wonderful game. When it first came out, I played it so much that I started losing feeling in my head and I had to see a doctor. Stardew Valley is great for all the reasons you've probably heard of over the years, but this is not really a review for Stardew as much as it is a vehicle for the discussion of farming games.

I like to keep up with the latest ""cozy"" game releases because sometimes I'll find something that looks really interesting, but let me tell you, there are. so. many. farming games. There are so many farming games. And do you want to know how many farming games manage to at least do something vaugely different from Stardew? 0. Harvest Moon started it and Stardew basically perfected this specific atmosphere and formula, and now it seems like every developer is rushing headlong to depict that same exact kind of magic Stardew has without even managing slightly.

And I get so heated because, fucking what? It's a genre of game based on harvesting food and you can really only think of one exact scenerio and one exact way to go about doing it? People have been foraging and farming for an absurd amount of time, there are hundreds of ways and techniques to go about doing it that could be fun when projected into a video game. The art of forgaing specifically, nurturing and coursing nature into producing more food, seems like it would naturally go hand in hand with the themes farming games tend to go for, but all's lost in the realm we are trapped in where no matter the location (space, fantasy) we are forced to obtain property, till soil, and probably pay off some type of debt or at the very least participate in an economy thats strikingly similar to the one most of the planet has now despite existing in a fictional world where anything can take place.

There is a prehistoric farming sim called Roots of Pacha. I know enough about history to know that the concept alone makes 0 sense, and when people did start farming, it wasnt by clearing away large plots of land like we would now and laboriously carrying them to fruit. The first people that raised crops did it hand in hand with foragaing, in a type of cultivation called flood retreat farming in which one plants seeds along seasonally flooding beds of water, so that nature pretty much does all the hard work for them and nothing much has to get in the way of other activities. I personally hate this game for its wasted potential alone, because the concept has so many directions it could go in and it barely went in any of them except for the detail that there's not a money based economy present (i think?). This is just one example of how creatively lacking farming games seem to be, I know Roots of Pacha has you doing other things like hunting and all that but the outline in this game and all others pretty much follow in this order of doing the exact same shit you did in Stardew but with little (what if... it was prehistoric!) to no twist, and with no Concernedape flare.

Another trend I've noticed with these games is that, despite the full focus on community building, caring for nature, and usually overthrowing some type of rich guy villian, what you actually do in the game contradicts these themes entirely. Obviously, traditional farming involves a lot of deforestation. Thats a point that gets brought up a lot, quite reasonably, because it always is really weird when a magic spirit of nature comes down to thank you for restoring the natural balance when you just got back from tearing down two entire ecosystems for wood. But there's also just so little need for our own economy inserted in most of these games. We live in a town, seperated from all of society (occassionally on another planet) with 12 inhabitants and youre still making me pay rent? You would think these apparently very self sufficent people would have no need for money but I guess not. And the material focus gets in the way a lot with the other mechanics. For example, most of the relationship building that's popular in farming games takes the form of you constantly offering up some object to them with little or no actual imput from you. Give your girl 80 wild flowers and she will eventually fall in love with you.


I feel as though a lot of it is obviously borrowed from early Harvest Moon, which honestly felt a little too cyclical for me to enjoy it at all. Very hardcore traditional values in those early games, and especially when it comes to your bachlorettes in which the process of getting them seems eerily similar to obtaining a cow or something, to further min max your farm and make boohoo bucks. In this genre it's still that, but with a splat of paint on it that says "we ♡ community! we hate big business!".


Stardew Valley is a little bit exempt from this in my mind, because it's taking place in a world that seems to be basically our own. If Harvey charges me 2000 gil to be rescued from some scary caves, then at least that part makes sense. The community in Stardew is shown repeatedly to be an imperfect peoples anyhow, what from Pam's parental abuse and someone apparently throwing stones at a homeless person's tent. I'm pretty sure back when it came out farming games werent as popular, and for all of that the gameplay loop is near perfect and very fun to play. So we've been there, done that is basically what I'm saying. ConcernedApe made the best tradional farming game and now I am really interested in any other ideas or concepts from anyone, at all. If I wanted to play a farming game, there is no reason why I would spend many, many hours building a farm in a game that is likely less inspired and less polished than Stardew when none of them offer anything new to the table, in quality of writing, story, or anything else.

There are some exceptions, like Dinkum (which is barely a farming game but has way more spunk than all games in this genre do combined) but for the most part I'm just tired of every game trying to be Stardew but instead of ____ there's _____! The gameplay loop gets incredibly old when there is nothing else backing it up.


Again, this wasnt really a review for this game but I just wanted to get my opinions out there and maybe see what others think. Thanks for listening to my ramblings (-: