As you know, each year consists of four months. Each month has 28 days. Each day has 18 hours. Each hour has 45 seconds. In total, a little more than 25 real hours per game year.
All this time you will work. Every day. All day. From early morning until late at night, perform thoughtless, monotonous, routine tasks. Which will never end. One crop is followed by another. The seasons change each other. Holidays come and go with ritual constancy.
And here it is thought out with brilliance. You dig, you plant, you water, you wait, you harvest. Sell. You repeat from the beginning. Build. Collect eggs, milk, wool, truffles. Pet your cat. You work in the field of a lumberjack, a miner, a fisherman, a cook, a secular lion, an adventurer. Fight monsters, charm the locals. All the time you are looking for something, you combine it, you do it in order to somehow use it somehow as part of some far-reaching ambitious plans. You spend more to earn more. Craft twenty chests and fill them with fruits, vegetables, berries, fish, weapons, wine and truffle oil.
You can perform dozens of simple actions. And there is always another modest success at arm’s length. Taken alone, this could get boring quickly. But it doesn’t smell like a separate place. Resources mined in one area will certainly be needed for progress in another. You don’t level specific abilities, you don’t follow isolated quest chains. You are slowly, methodically, drunkenly unraveling a huge knot called a farm.
Let’s say you water your garden every day. If you don’t want to, make sprinklers. To do this, you need copper and iron ingots. Go to the mine for ore. Smelt the ore in the smelter. To build a furnace, you need copper, stones and instructions from the local blacksmith Clint. Don’t forget the stove is charcoal fired. It’s also in the mine. Or go to the forest, chop wood and make coal out of them in another furnace. But for her, of course, you need gold. But wait! The store sells a large backpack!
Stardew Valley knows no tension, no climax, no denouement. There is a plot and a very conditional, fragmentary line of events, and the ending, after which you can continue to play until the end of time, comes after two years. This is not a dot or even an ellipsis, but a barely noticeable comma in a plotless narrative.
There is no plot in this story, but there are city characters and your relationship with them. fc And someone such simulators do not attract at all.f There are love adventures for every taste. Brides and grooms anywhere, in the prime of life. Cheerful and serious. Bold and shy. Strong and independent or touchingly vulnerable. Admire, be touched, correct, save, seek support. You will want to go through this experience, because all these women and men, their characters, habits, problems, dreams and desires are so well written.
And this applies not only to those citizens who dream of getting into your pants. All local residents, from young to old, from the mayor to the homeless, inspire sympathy and trust. Everyone has their own routine, their own schedule. Their short but varied greetings and dialogues. Likes and dislikes. Their screen time is limited and yes, they are stereotypical, even caricatured. But stereotypes only designate their characters, not define them. They give you a starting point and allow you to cut a couple of corners in building relationships. Chat with them more often, give them ice cream and diamonds.
Stardew Valley is an ordinary marvel of pixel art. The game could hardly have looked any different. Given its obvious affinity to the SNES classic “Harvest Moon” and the fact that man-orchestra Eric Baron handled the development almost single-handedly. But this game is not just about pixel art. She accepts and understands it as a means of artistic expression.
There is a template of a small familiar town on the East Coast of the United States, which now and then pops up in melodramas and commercials. Oversaturated with bright colors. Conflict-free. Squeaky cozy. The raster editor strips most of the sugary falsity from this template and leaves only a murderous, merciless lamp-likeness that will devour your weekends without a trace and begin to lick your lips at weekdays if you are not vigilant.
Star dew reduces life to the life of action – to deeds, and finds in the process of repetition not idleness, but festivity. This is not a game
The player character can interact with non-player characters (NPCs) inhabiting the neighboring town, communicate with them, even acquire a husband or wife and children. All these activities are limited in time within each game day; if the character’s fatigue scale reaches zero, he will be returned to the farmhouse and will be able to continue his studies only the next day. Similarly.
if a character’s health bar is depleted, they will lose a random amount of money and items, but it is impossible to “lose” the game. The game uses a simplified calendar with four 28-day months, each of which represents a season, which determines what crops the player can grow on the farm and what activities are available to him at any given moment. In Stardew Valley, there are no specific deadlines or goals that will stop the game; although the farm is evaluated in the third game year—which the player has achieved in the previous two years—the game does not end and can continue indefinitely.
