Today marks the 7-year anniversary of the release of Stardew Valley, arguably one of the best farming sim games ever to exist. It is what I would consider to be the game that relaunched the trend of farming-life simulators after the rise and fall of Harvest Moon.
— ConcernedApe (@ConcernedApe) February 26, 2023
I’ve been a fan of the farming sim genre for a long time now. I remember playing Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life as a plucky youth and not only finding myself hopelessly falling for Muffy but also entrenched in what would become a staple genre for me.
Sometimes, it’s nice to escape. It’s nice to get away from the big city and become a farmer after somebody in my family died and decided to leave a piece of shit farm to me. The real world is scary and confusing, and each day I have to “work” at my “job” and “create content” for people to “read”. Why wouldn’t I want to hoe around (hoe as in farming)?
I have hundreds of hours on Stardew Valley across Steam, Nintendo Switch, mobile, and iOS. I would comfortably describe it as one of my favourite farming games, if not one of my favourite games entirely. Eric Barone, the creator of Stardew Valley, created the game as the “ultimate farming game” after being unhappy with the direction that Harvest Moon went in, and he succeeded in making a farming game for the ages.
What really, in my eyes, has made Stardew Valley shine is both the consistent free updates made by Barone as well as the absolutely bonkers amount of mods available for the game. There is an entire community of people that have built whole new sets of characters, locations, events, maps and story for the game, and if you haven’t heard of Stardew Valley Extended, I highly recommend getting amongst it. Without it, I never would have met my MILF wife Olivia.
As of 2022, Stardew Valley has sold over 20 million copies. It’s received nothing but praise from critics, and is considered to be one of the greatest games of all time. Even the original creator of Harvest Moon Yasuhiro Wada thinks it slaps hard.
So I just wanted to take this moment to wish Stardew Valley a happy 7-year anniversary, and send my thanks to Eric Barone for making such a special game. Here’s hoping he doesn’t work himself to dust making Haunted Chocolatier like he did with Stardew Valley.
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