Not only do I think Stardew Valley is the best farm-sim game of all time, it’s also one of my favorite games ever. In late 2018, I was at a small anime convention and heard about the game at a panel. I bought the game for PS4 that same day and tried it out for a few hours but gave up on it. Then I tried it again for the Switch in 2020 and became addicted. I did a review in 2021, but I’ve put in another hundred hours since then, and there have been numerous updates.
During the first hour, the game starts off like any farm-sim game during the tutorial stages. You grow tired of your corporate job and move to Pelican Town. Your grandfather left you a farm, and you decide its a nice change of pace. You get to pick what kind of farm you want, and then it’s your job to clear out the sticks and weed and revive it. Then you get your introductions to the town and the surrounding area. Then things really take off and branch into literally thousands of things to do.
First you get to construct your farm any way you like. Plant seeds and grow crops, fish in your pond, or take care of animals. Many of the better crops and animals require patiently waiting for the seasons to change, upgrading shops, or leveling up. But it’s all worth it because you can literally turn your farm into a massive money maker. Even after you’re a millionaire and money doesn’t matter anymore, there’s something so satisfying about taking care of your farm.
But you don’t just have to sell your crops. You can craft them into a bunch of other items or give them as gifts to locals. Gifting is huge because the town has a massive ecosystem of NPC’s. Every character has their own backstories and a ton of dialogue and special events. Plus you can romance a bunch of them. I remember when I first started playing on the Switch, I decided that I wanted to romance Abigail, and I spent hours of IRL playtime of talking to her, gifting, and leveling up our relationship levels.
As you increase your relationship level with a character, you unlock special cutscenes and dialogue. Then you can even marry them, have them move in with you, and have a kid. Even if you give up on doing all the other aspects so you can just focus on relationships, you can spend hours working on every character. It’s so worth it. You can only marry one person but maxing out every character just to see their events and dialogue is so much fun.
Taking care of your farm and managing the entire ecosystem of Pelican Town is a huge undertaking that can alone cost you dozens of hours. But there’s so much more to do. Fishing and heading into the mines are the next two biggest gameplay mechanics, and they’re so much fun. I don’t recall ever having a real reason to use the mines, but I definitely spent hours trying to go as deep as I could. Then all the ore and items I found were put to good use for selling and crafting.
Fishing is another giant ecosystem. There’s a bunch of different fish you can catch, with each one having a different rarity tier. You can sell them to make money, eat them to recover energy, or give them as gifts. Personally I think the fishing mini game is the best out of any game I’ve ever played. I probably spent way too much time fishing and leveling up my fishing skill.
But then there’s even more to do, I visited the Community Center often to complete bundles, attended every festival I could, donated artifacts to the museum, and visited random places like the Wizard and Ginger Island. When I first played the Switch version, I must have put in at least 200 hours into the game throughout 2020 and 2021 before I grew tired and moved on to other stuff. But there’s been so many updates since then that when I went back to revisit, I put another 100 hours in.
Just in the past three years, there have been free updates that brought hundreds of new items, a new farm type, a new festival, a new mastering system, new crops, and new NPC dialogue. I took a couple years off and when I went back, Stardew Valley felt like a brand new game. I continued my main playthrough to keep building on it, but I also started new ones to experiment with new stuff.
The game is so satisfying and the mechanics are all great. The game is even better if you have friends because you can have multiple players work on the same farm. If you decide to get the game on Steam instead of the Switch, you get even more options because there’s hundreds of cool mods to choose from that affect your experience significantly. But even just the vanilla experience on the Switch will be phenomenal.
There’s lots of farm-sim games out there. You have the big ones like the Rune Factory, Story of Seasons, and Harvest Moon series. There are some unique ones too like Harvestella and My Time at Portia. There’s a bunch of smaller ones too. Many of them are good, but none of them have ever come close to the behemoth that is Stardew Valley. If you’ve never played it before, you have to buy it now. If you have but it’s been a while, jump back into it.