Thoughts (review) on Stardew Valley

Thoughts (review) on Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley is Harvest Moon clone that has blown up on its launch and has taken the steam market by storm and casual players (and streamers) can't stop playing it. As someone who only really got in to Harvest Moon through speedrunning (prior to playing any games with speedrunning related thoughts I had only played Wonderful Life, Tale of Two Towns and New Beginning) I don't really have the sense of nostalgia for Harvest Moon that Stardew Valley attempts to recapture.

Being perfectly honest for a second, I went into Stardew Valley a bit biased, I was a little annoyed that I series I enjoy as much as Harvest Moon gets barely any attention, whilst a game that is built around appealing to Harvest Moon fans gains massive popularity from the get go. When I first played the game I played it for about 45 minutes and was left feeling a bit disappointed. I was one day into the game and all I could judge was the atmosphere and controls. I wasn't going to make a verdict on the game as a whole yet, because I had only just started playing it, and I had to cleanse myself from the bias before revisiting it. Upon revisiting it and playing it for a few hours, I found myself playing the game purely because if I wasn't playing it I would be sitting at my computer with nothing to do.

Because it's the first thing you're introduced to in the game I'll talk about the controls and atmosphere first. The controls are your typical keyboard + mouse computer game, WASD to move, shift to sprint (although auto-run is automatically ticked in the options) and you're able to rebind keys if you don't like the defaults.
The mouse is used for selecting which piece of land you want to perform certain actions on, such as watering, planting, etc. This is where it gets weird, because if your mouse is too close to your character, they'll use the item they're holding in the direction of the mouse, ignoring the direction they're facing. So even after playing the game for a good few hours, I would still find myself using my axe on the wrong spot because it would auto target my mouse instead of the, much more natural and sensible, direction I was facing.
Another thing worth noting is the run speed is awful. There isn't much to expand on that, just that your character runs slow as hell and makes moving anywhere feel tedious.
To interact with characters or certain items you have to either right click them or press whatever key you have that action assigned to. However aside from having to do this right next to the person/item in question, which is fine, sometimes you will also need to hover your mouse over them, and sometimes you have to right click. Other times I just wasn't allowed to interact with people and wasn’t given a reason why, they would just ignore me.

Onto the atmosphere of the game. When I first played the game for 45 minutes, I had music on, after that I had music turned off, and had my own music on instead. Some people might like the calm banjo plinking, but to me it was just a bit annoying.
The game world is quite big, but in the weirdest way, because it isn't because there's loads to do, it's just big because houses are big, everything's spread out and the camera is extremely zoomed in. It made walking around the map feel like a chore and coupled with the previously mentioned run speed it stopped me from wanting to explore new parts of the map.
I don't actually know whether people generally find the graphics in this game nice, but to me going for a "retro pixel" art style was a really poor choice. First of all, it's been done to death. Second of all, I don't even think Stardew Valley did it well. The character sprites all look like Lemmings, and the character portraits look like they come straight out of King's Quest. Trying to do the portraits realistically in a pixel style, could've worked, but it just didn't and half the character come out looking really weird and creepy. Especially Pam.

The gameplay is what you would expect from a Harvest Moon clone. It's Harvest Moon. Unfortunately for me it's Harvest Moon done not that well. Crops work on a 1x1 system, similar to Wonderful Life, Lost Valley, possibly Save the Homeland and maybe some others, and honestly I don't mind this system. Yes I prefer 3x3 crops in which a bag of seeds can be used on 9 squares instead of 1, but the 1x1 system can work just as well. If done well, that is. My problem with Stardew Valley's crops is that I didn't feel like I was getting much reward for my crops, the parsnips you are given at the beginning of the game give you 15(g?) profit, and one of the first goal is to build a barn which requires 4000g. This massive leap makes it seem like my crops aren't worth the time, but at the moment they're all I can do.
Foraging works by chopping wood, picking stone, and cutting grass/weeds, similar to most Harvest Moon games. There aren't really any problems I can think of with foraging, and I think I probably made more profit off of foraging than I did growing crops. There was one problem I had when foraging and that's whenever there's anything behind a tree it's only shown when you are also behind the tree, which lead to me running into a lot of rocks and weeds that I didn't know were there. A minor annoyance, yes, but if it worked like Magical Melody where items behind trees are always shown slightly, this problem wouldn't exist.
Fishing is awful. Don't bother fishing because it fucking sucks. After getting a "hit" there's this weird mini-game that you do in order to catch the fish, and is really dumb. They should've either made fishing similar to Animal Crossing and some Harvest Moon game (Wonderful Life, Magical Melody, Lost Valley, and probably more) or just kept it at clicking at the right time like Harvest Moon for the SNES.
Befriending villagers works exactly like you expect it to except you can only give a villager 2 items within a certain period, for some reason.
I tried to play the game to the point where I got animals so that I could judge that aspect of the game, but I just didn't want to play it anymore.

Overall I feel that Stardew Valley is a bit of a right place at the right time game, and only really got popular because people have stopped paying attention to Harvest Moon because of the whole Natsume/Marvelous ownership thing, and Stardew Valley attempts to capture the spirit of the old games in the Harvest Moon series that everyone seems to be nostalgic for, instead of creating a unique experience. I tried to find something that I did enjoy about the game, but the only thing I can think of is that it keeps me busy, despite not enjoying it.