Kara Phillips:
At this point,
Stardew Valley
feels like the gift that keeps on giving. When you first play it feels like you’ve got a whole world at your fingertips—everything feels so new and exciting.
But the best part of Stardew is no matter how long you’ve been playing, this feeling doesn’t go away.
Even when you’ve decided to speedrun to Ginger Island, restore the community center in your first year, and fill the library with everything you find.
With a lot of farming simulators, it’s pretty easy to get bored of completing the same tasks every single day— cultivating your crops and tending to your animals—but so much time has been put into making Pelican Town lively enough that even winter is an exciting season. It’s basically impossible to get bored.
We’ve been treated this year to the biggest content update the game has ever received, too, so even for someone like me who has been playing for the better part of six years now it feels like I’ve just picked it up for the first time. Which is very impressive for a game that initially revolves around such a simple day-to-day routine. Plus, there’s now a family of raccoons to help out and that’s an instant win in my books.