At the end of March, I moved. I quit my corporate, soul-sucking job and moved to the countryside, to a small, run-down farm that my grandfather left me in his will. Since then, I have spent most of my waking hours at this new life, cultivating the farm, getting married, having some slightly creepy children, and fighting monsters in mysterious caverns.
I’m talking about falling into the world of Stardew Valley, to be clear.
You’ve probably heard of this game, at least in passing. It’s…okay, it’s a farming game, but there’s a lot more to it than just growing potatoes. If you’ve played it, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, well, it’s a little difficult to explain, but I will do my level best.
First, the details:
Stardew Valley (2016)
Developer: Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone
Publisher: Chucklefish
Platform: iOS (also available for Android, Mac/PC, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox)
Slight spoilers
I grew up on old school Nintendo and later, Super Nintendo games. When video game systems started getting more complicated, I started losing my ability to play a lot of them. I get dizzy easily. If I try to watch Mr. Price playing something like Fortnite for more than a few minutes, I almost have to lie down. So many games are like that now that I’d all but abandoned the idea that I might ever be able to indulge in this hobby until I was gifted with a Nintendo 3DS a few years ago. After that, I became obsessed with all things pocket monster-related. I was, indeed, the very best. I’ve spent many happy hours since then playing several of the Pokémon titles. Thanks to Nintendo’s clever idea to port in older titles to the DS, I went back through Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I even played around with Donkey Kong Country 2 until I became stymied by a level that I now remember being hell to get through way back when I was a kid.
Recently, a string of bad circumstances left me burned out and weary. I remembered an article that described a certain game that was great for relieving stress. I couldn’t remember it, so I asked the Oracle at Goggle. Lo, I was introduced to the bucolic paradise that is Stardew Valley. I discovered that the game was available for mobile devices, so I purchased it for my tablet and dove in.
I played for eight hours that day.
In my defense, I had badly injured my back and couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t want to read — I was irritated by my then-current read, and didn’t feel like trying anything new. I was at a natural stopping point in the television series I’d been watching, Once Upon a Time (which I started watching after Merrin wrote about the final season). I truly didn’t feel up to doing much else. Stardew Valley was (and still is) a great distraction.
Since that fateful day at the end of March, I’ve logged MANY hours in the Valley. The game’s mechanics make it interesting to keep going, even after you’ve “finished” the main goal, which is to receive your grandfather’s approval for what you’ve done with his legacy. Yes, the same dead grandfather who left you the farm in the first place. Stay with me.
In addition to just creating a farm, you grow relationships with the people who reside in and around Pelican Town. You make friends, you date, and you can even get married. Hell, you can get DIVORCED, and then marry somebody else if you decide that, for some reason, you want a different spouse. Of course, after the divorce, your ex-spouse hates you, won’t talk to you, and will only tell you how unhappy they are now that you’ve left them. Can’t bear that? The game’s got your back. I won’t go into it, because I don’t want to spoil too much, but there’s a way to wipe their memory of you ever having been married, so you can become friends all over again.
Speaking of marriage, the game is fairly inclusive on this front, with each potential spouse being perfectly happy to enter into a same-sex relationship. One of the female NPCs even has an ex-girlfriend, if your avatar happens to be female.
It’s not all paradise, though. Nobody’s perfect. Depression, PTSD, anxiety, alcoholism, and disability are all issues that different NPCs experience. It’s surprisingly true to life on these issues. One particular character, who struggles with social anxiety, confesses that it’s very hard for him to be around people. Another character, a soldier who isn’t present during your first in-game year, has severe PTSD and depression after his experience at war, and a painful cutscene illustrates just how much this poor man is dealing with.
There’s also a small discussion to be had about gentrification and big business. You have two options early on in the game: you can choose to help restore the decrepit community center, which will make everyone happy, or you can choose to purchase a membership at the newly constructed big box store (whose logo suspiciously resembles a certain online retailer), which turns the aforementioned old community center into a warehouse. It almost seems like a natural choice, right? Of course nobody really wants to support the soul-sucking corporate entity (which is your character’s former employer — watch the opening scenes for some amusing, yet faintly disturbing scenes of what life is like in the cubicle maze). Although, when you talk to the other villagers, some of them mention that although they might not enjoy shopping at JojaMart, they can afford so much more than they could at the small, locally-owned shop. This revelation made me pause for a minute; was I really making the right decision by pitting myself against the affordable shopping option that several of the families in the village depend upon?
Why have I, personally, spent so much time at this game? Because real life is hectic and chaotic, and sometimes I just need a break from all of it. It’s been a difficult year. Even a vacation would be too stressful, because the looming specter of the return to reality always casts a shadow over any sort of time off. Much in the same way that I binged my way through Pokémon X during the worst time of my adult life, I am spending as much of my free time as possible playing this game: roaming around the Valley, making friends, raising tiny dinosaurs, and growing strawberries are all very therapeutic. I cannot control a great deal of what is going on in Real Life, but if I decide that today I’m going to tear up all of the crops in my virtual greenhouse and just grow coffee beans, I can do it. It’s comforting to exert this amount of control when the real world feels so chaotic.
So if you’re in the market for an active escape from reality, a mini-vacation almost, why not give this game a try? It can be addictive though, so keep that in mind if you decide to throw it all away and run away to the countryside.
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