Game Review: Stardew ValleyBy Anne-Marie Gagne
Stardew Valley was first released in February of 2016 by Eric Barone (ConcernedApe) for the PC. It was solely created and developed by ConcernedApe until update 1.3 when he got help from others for the updates and porting the games to other consoles. It has sold over 20 million copies as of March of 2022 across all platforms.
The game is, according to the Stardew Valley website, an open-ended, country-life RPG. Your character is tired of their dead-end desk job working for Joja Corporation and decides to move to the farm that your grandfather left to you after his death when the city life doesn’t fulfill your dreams of living a good life. When you start a game, there’s an easy to use menu to create your character. You’ll be asked your name, the name of your farm, and what your favorite thing is. Then you choose what you will look like from your hair style to the color of your pants. You also pick a gender, though it has no affect on anything in game besides a few bits of dialogue. The game is fairly straightforward. You start by cleaning up the farm enough to be able to plant crops, which you can sell for money and/or eat for energy, and you can build farm buildings to raise animals. There’s also the Community Center that you can fix up or you can let it become a Joja Corporation warehouse depending on what you pick in the story. There’s also the residents of Pelican Town you can make friends with. They each have different storylines and you can romance some of them regardless of your gender. In the beginning, it can be slightly tedious since you have low energy which makes it a bit repetitive in the first few days in-game. The quests you are given vary in difficulty and there’s a lot to explore around town. The game has a lot of replay-ability and you can do things differently each time. There’s no time limit or specific order to do things (with a few rare exceptions). The only real issue I have with the game is that there are only two genders to pick from. Overall, I give the game an 8.5 out of 10. You can find Stardew Valley on Steam, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, the Nintendo Switch, and Android and Apple devices. |