What's great is that crops have all manner of other uses beyond cold hard ducats, and you're very much encouraged to be growing something at all time. You have the choice, therefore, of maintaining a moderately-sized farm that won't require too much time and energy to water every day and diverting those resources towards more subjectively engrossing activities like fishing or spelunking the local mines, or building a farm so big that you're spending almost every day maintaining it - only using the occasional rainy day to pursue other interests - for the sake of your profit margin. It's an exercise in delayed gratification, as a few dozen fully grown veggies and fruit can give you a major financial boost towards anything else you might be working towards, whether that's structures to house additional livestock, home improvements or helping to fund any number of alternate activities you might be getting involved with. To farm, it's simply a matter of preparing the land, sowing the seeds and watering the budding crops every day until they ripen, at which point they can be harvested and sold. However, there's a surprising amount of versatility given to how much time you're willing to spend tilling, the hours you'll drop on crops, your finite lifespan spent with a watering can, etc. Everyone refers to you as "farmer" (or whatever your character's name is if they're feeling charitable) and most of the game's progression is linked to what you are able to farm on the immense plot of land you have to work with during any given season. You'd be forgiven for thinking the farming was the chief focus of Stardew Valley, since you first arrive there to run your deceased grandfather's farm and whatnot. Is it the farming? Drink up, little ground-babies. I mean, let's not kid ourselves here, it's a workable framing device.Welcome to Framing Simulator 2016. Since I haven't been tested for insanity recently, I'm going to ask myself a series of semi-rhetorical questions and see if I can respond by analyzing whether or not they're the root (so to speak) of Stardew Valley's pastoral charms. Possibly at the end of the article, depending on how conventional I feel like being. I suspect it has a lot of overlap with why I adore Dark Cloud 2/Dark Chronicle so much, but we'll leave the conclusions for later. What I'd like to do here is to try and put together an explanation for why that is expanding on the many layers of Stardew Valley's onion-like structure and why this game in particular is sticking with me in spite of my dropping out of easygoing contemporaries like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon comparatively quickly. Yet I feel I could play Stardew Valley for another week straight and still not tire of it, nor fully exhaust everything it has to offer. I've played games similar to Stardew Valley before, and in each successive case I've reached that point of total saturation earlier and earlier. One of those sales happened recently, and so I've found myself spending as much time as I can free up to till the land, plant some crops and spend the rest of my daytime chasing after any number of short- and long-term goals.īut it has given me pause for thought. I find that Dan's views mirror my own more closely than anyone on the Bomb Squad, though, and duly added Stardew Valley to my Steam wishlist in preparation for the next big sale. Frankly, I wasn't really convinced of its endless appeal even after "Dirty" Dan Ryckert extolled its virtues on the Bombcast a few months back, as he remained the single voice of passion for the game in a manner comparable to how he was the only person on GBWest's staff to give two hoots and a Napstablook about the similarly friendship-heavy and visually low-key Undertale. Like many of you, albeit several months further away from its release in February of this year, I've been spellbound by ConcernedApe's Stardew Valley: a retro/pixel farming and life simulator set in an idyllic burg with an abundance of NPCs to befriend and revenue-generating professions to pursue.
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