Stardew Valley - You got dungeon crawling in my farming game

If you know what Harvest Moon is, you'll know what Stardew Valley is. This game doesn't even try to pretend its not a clone but rather embraces it. The game was developed by one guy, ConcernedApe for 3 years. The reason he started the game was he felt that Harvest Moon was moving too far from its roots and wanted a game that felt like the old SNES, n64, Playstation version of the game. What this game is, is a farming simulator. Not like the actual farming simulator game but a simplified, romanticized version of farming, along with gifting villagers, dungeon crawling, fishing, and other things. Like all Harvest Moon games, you inherited a farm from your grandfather and must change it from a desolate broken down heap of trash into a thriving farm filled with rows upon rows of crops. How you get there, is up to whatever path you choose.

Of all the different things you can do in the game, lets start with the most obvious, farming. When you first start the game you basically get dropped off on a huge plot of land. And when I say huge I meant huge. This massive and majestic beast of a farmland can fit five of the most recent handheld Harvest Moon games on the plot and still have room leftover. One thing the more recent games of the Harvest Moon series have been doing wrong was moving away from the farming roots. You get to open shops, fight monsters, tame animals, etc. But what happened to the farming? Isn't that the main reason the game was made? To simulate life as a farmer? Anyways back to your plot of land, you get a couple tools to start off, a watering can, a hoe, a scythe, a pickaxe, and an axe. You chop down some annoying trees, pickaxe away some rocks, scythe down some grass, hoe the land, plant the seeds you conveniently received from the mayor as a housewarming gift, and then water the seeds. This will be your daily routine for the rest of the game as you slowly expand the farmable area on your land. The tools can be upgraded to improve the cutting speed, or the area you can water and will help speed things up as you get better.

After repeating the steps above for a few days you'll notice that the crops are ready. The game is divided into 4 seasons, each 28 days long. Some crops take 5 days to grow, some others take 14, and some even take 24 days. Knowing what seeds to buy is an important thing to know. Do you buy seeds that take 14 days to grow because it gives the best return of cost per profit, or do you buy fast growing crops to start getting some income so you don't end up being poor and unable to do anything. Crops will grow in every season except winter unless you have a greenhouse. Each season has their own crops and most will not carry over to the other season. So don't plant a crop that takes 24 days to grow near the end of Spring or it'll wither and die as soon as Summer begins. Unless that crop is a multi season one like corn. Once the crops have grown, you can harvest them and throw them into the shipping bin where the mayor will come every night and pay you a sum of money the next morning for whatever you shipped. But what about winter? Will I starve to death?

The game also allows the raising of livestock. You can build a coop, which can house chickens and ducks who will lay eggs every day or every two days for ducks. They will need to eat hay every day, either from cutting down grass or buying them from the ranch in town. Eventually you will be able to house rabbits in the coop as well letting you collect wool from them. The barn can also be built and house cows, goats, sheep and pigs. Cows and goats can be milked, sheep can be sheared for wool, and pigs can be used to dig for truffles. These too need to be fed everyday, as well as petted. If you don't pet your livestock they will get mad and refuse to lay eggs or produce milk. One thing however, unlike something like Shepherds Crossing,  you aren't able to slaughter them and harvest their meat. This is a romanticized version of farming, these animals are your friends and you must give your utmost love and affection. You could however, sell them. The ones which likes you more with more hearts, will sell for more. I don't know why but I guess pets who are raised with love taste better when you ship them off to the butcher. You could focus more on ranching, focusing more on creating artisan products from milk to make cheese or mayonnaise from eggs over farming crops if you want.

Another alternative to farming is fishing. Once you have acquired a fishing rod, you are able to start fishing in any body of water in the game. Starting off fishing may seem like a chore, and not much profit for the effort spent but as you get better, the easier it becomes to fish rarer fish which sells for ludicrous amounts of money. Fish are affected by seasons as well, but unlike crops you don't need to worry about when to plant them or what to do during winter. After you're done the daily chores of watering all your crops and feeding your livestock, you can spend the rest of the time fishing if you need that extra money. Another thing about fishing are crab pots. You can drop them in the ocean with bait and come back the next day to find stuff caught inside. Sometimes is garbage people threw in the ocean, sometimes its lobsters. Some fish will only show up in certain weathers, different time of days, or certain locations. Fishing is like a game within a game, and to catch them all require a lot of patience.

Last but not least, there is mining. You may enter the mines at any time and start digging your way down. There are monsters inside the mine and the game sort of turns into a dungeon crawl. You need to mine rocks and beneath them you may find ores, or ladders. The ladder lets you descend to the next floor and the ores are used to upgrade your tools. If you find gemstones they can be sold for money or gifted to people for big friendship points. Monsters also drop loot which can be sold for money. Mining can be quite profitable as you start digging deeper into the mine. Every 5 levels is an elevator that acts as a shortcut for the next time you go down. However, if you die inside the mine you will get knocked out, sent to the hospital or woken up at the entrance of the mine and the jerk monsters will steal your gold, 5 items you are carrying and also you will suffer a concussion that makes you forget the last 10 levels you dug and have to find the elevators all over again. Do not get knocked out as its a huge setback. But the greater the risk the greater the rewards.

This is not everything in the game either, there is an actual story. You basically left city life working at the Joja offices to become a farmer. However, at the countryside, an aggressive Joja Mart has set up shop and is driving local mom and pop stores out of business. There are two ways to tackle this problem, the common sense route is to fight the problem by showing this town is worth saving by starting with the town center. Inside there, little spirits have made it its home and you can do bundle quests to restore it to how it was before. These bundles are made from all sorts of things ranging from crops, to fish, to ores, to cooked food. Basically it makes you do everything in the game and rewards you with small items and unlocks new areas and things to do in the game. The other way is to become a Joja Mart member and buy the town hall and have it demolished into a storage facility and then buy the rest of the upgrades directly instead of doing bundles. This goes against everything harvest moon but its for people who don't like to collect items and doing little quests and just want to shove money so they can unlock the same things. These unlocks range from accessing the mine carts in town for fast travel, to fixing the bus stop so you can ride to the desert, a second area/town with more villagers, crops, a harder more difficult mine, and even a difficult dungeon to dungeon crawl in.

The game alone without the story and unlocked new areas would be amazing but adding these little extra things push it far above the Harvest Moon series. Its everything Harvest Moon was and is, but done better and expanded upon. Dungeon crawling adds a new element to the farming game and is comparable to something like the Rune Factory spinoffs for Harvest Moon. If you like anything from the Harvest Moon series you'll love this game. If you don't know and never tried, this game will be a good one to get started with as its simple to pick up and filled to the brim with complexity if you wished it to be. You can skip all the combat if you wished and just go the Joja Mart route if you wished. The best thing? This game is a quarter of the price of Harvest Moon at only $15 so its cheap to pick up and try compared to the Harvest Moon series. A quarter of the price and tenfold in content, its no wonder this game is getting so much praise and became one of the top games on steam after only a week of its release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot7uXNQskhs