Volume 6: Meeting My Match
Dear reader, the majority of this column has been about games I had absolutely no chance of playing in their primes. I wasn’t born to ride the wave of Super Mario 64, nor Super Metroid, but there are more than a few games I did have the chance to appreciate, but just… didn’t. Stardew Valley is one of those that I simply never understood.
Worse than not understanding it, Stardew Valley stresses me out. It stresses me out in ways I can’t explain without oversharing. This relaxing farming simulator panics me more than actual horror games; I have to stop playing after more than an hour out of a sheer panic that something awful is going to happen, and that I’m simply playing the game wrong. It’s a standard I’ve impressed upon myself, and it’s affected how I view Stardew ever since first buying it years ago. Since then, it’s been in my library, silently mocking me because I could never lose myself in it like dozens of my friends.
And after forcing myself to play a full in-game year, I can’t say I’m a convert, but I think I understand why Stardew Valley leaves me in a cold sweat. I’ve already lived through this game, and I continue to do so every day.
To cover my bases, I’ve also had no experience with any of the Harvest Moon games that inspired Stardew Valley, but the general flow is almost identical. You start with a ramshackle piece of land, and your job is to transform it into a source of income, while making friends with the townsfolk, and eventually finding a life of your own. You plant crops, you water crops, you harvest crops, and then you sell crops. Rinse, repeat, optimize. You can also throw yourself into the mines, if you’d like.
Despite how the entire farming life sim genre is framed as a “cozy” experience, you can’t escape that the majority of Stardew Valley is literal chorework; same goes for most of this entire sub-genre. Manual labour to get money, to spend money to improve your potential to earn more money. It makes the best out of a bad lot, and attempts to honey the capitalist experience into a more palatable reality than the dystopia we find ourselves in currently. I’m not critiquing Stardew Valley for providing an escapist fantasy where everything works, but I am saying that escapism isn’t something I’ve been able to enjoy.
For the most part, Stardew Valley is what you make of it, and I made a personal hell that channels my anxiety into one small plot of land where my entire financial future was bound. All this to say, there’s an unspoken pressure I couldn’t help but cave to. The premise is wrapped around you abandoning the doldrums of modern life to make for a simpler living on your Grandad’s abandoned farm. A cute enough setup, minus your grandfather silently judging your actions across the time you spend there.
Of course, this judgement’ ends up being about as harsh as a pat on the shoulder. But the concept of that judgement, even softly, is enough to change the way that I play, and make me think about optimising my potential at the cost of my own ease. I speak as someone who has been on the receiving end of such “soft” judgement; I associate it with anxiety and worrying about what I’ve not heard. Yeah, they’ve told me that I’ve “tried my best,” but is that just to soften the blow?
It’s a fool’s errand in anxiety, and it’s unfortunately managed to take away from a relaxing experience. This feeds into a compulsion to want to know everything without having the chance to discover. I can’t discover, I’m wasting valuable time. I’ve talked about it with rewinding gameplay, and I’ve tussled with save states, but there is nothing I hate more than a compulsion to resort to a fan-made resource for important information. I totally accept that this is a personal demon, but I find that Stardew Valley implicitly pressures you to go beyond the bounds of the game in order to learn about obscure mechanics, or the best way to gather materials.
In a game primarily about finding specific items to put into specific places, I often felt like I was left floundering for direction and fighting against the invisible timer I’d imposed on myself. Not least because I was writing this, but because I wanted to do well. That’s when I sat down and had a good think to myself about why people like this type of game; succeeding in Stardew Valley is a complicated metric that goes well beyond getting rewarded in-game, it’s an exercise in letting go, and playing.
I can’t imagine that my friends feel quite the same stress that I do, when describing how they’ve started their fifth farm this year. I also can’t pretend that I don’t get it; Stardew’s appeal is built on abandoning the doldrums of corporate life to enjoy the idyllic countryside with no costs.
Stardew Valley is gorgeous, and manages to tap into the humble realities of living in a farming village; having spent my childhood in a place of a similar scope, I continue to appreciate the dedication to depth over width. Despite being deceptively small, I’m impressed how Stardew Valley manages to use every small bit of land to its advantage, and weave a social web out of its characters. I would stop short of calling them the most memorable cast of all time, but they’re certainly charming, for the most part. I’m not one hundred percent sure I understand the fandom cults around certain townsfolk, but that ship may have sailed. Perhaps, I was too late.
There is a terrible lot to love here, but returning to the farm has reminded me I was never built to thrive there. This is a game I can understand, if not totally commit myself to. Not only that, Stardew Valley made me stare into the mirror, and confront myself in a way I wouldn’t have expected.
Like I said at the star, I am absolutely not a convert; Stardew Valley still stresses me out terribly. But, this is a rare instance of a game I can understand from a distance, while still acknowledging that it irritates me on a molecular level. I wish I could love this game like so many others, and that might be the saddest part of all.
Even after a decade of putting it off, I can tell Stardew Valley is a special game that just isn’t meant for me. I’m sure it isn’t too late, but it might be a bit too soon for me. Maybe another day. Next time, I’ll probably opt for surviving an apocalyptic wasteland, because God knows I can’t survive on a farm.
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