Stardew Valley Review

Stardew Valley Review

[Music] the many surprises of stardew Valley were a big part of why I enjoyed it the game slowly expands in ways that I didn’t expect probably because I knew nothing about it before I played if you like progression games with a steady drip of unlocks options and something close to Base building then I’m certain that you will love this game don’t watch the video play the game instead and then come back afterwards for those undecided here’s the most important pieces of information that I can share that it’s not all about farming it has a lot of gameplay for its price and that it’s a grinding game that knows it’s a grinding game Let’s address that last one because it somewhat contradicts with some of the criticism I laid on Dragon’s Dogma in my last video I rarely enjoy progression systems because they’re normally used as padding they’ll be put in other games that have a main type of gameplay combat shooting whatever the main draw is in order to artificially inflate the amount of stuff there is to do I don’t know if this is because so many games draw inspiration from the addiction Loop found in World of Warcraft or if it’s a trickling down from so many AAA titles that employ these types of time syncs they’re usually in the form of Collectibles arbitrary achievements lists to complete and checkboxes to fill these aren’t always bad I know a lot of people like them and they’re not wrong to do so it provides a decent chunk of value for money and not every game needs to be wrenchingly engaging there’s something very appealing about being able to relax and do something close to Mindless close to repetitive as with all things however it depends on how well it’s executed stard Valley has built itself around this type of progression the achievements and checkboxes aren’t tertiary tasks they’re the whole game and because they’ve been made into the whole game they’ve received enough attention to flesh them out and intermingle the game isn’t a bunch of tasks in lines that go in different directions it’s a knot of them that Interlink to understand this look at those progression paths you of course have farming but also fishing and Mining then there’s exploration and forging there’s combat in the mines and interacting with the nearby towns people there are a few more arguably smaller things that I’m omitting for now to avoid spoilers I’ll get into them in the second half of the video you unlock options for farming while progressing through mining fishing and combat befriending people in town leads to gifts that also help you cooking recipes especially it’s the crafting that really brings it all together since materials required from One path will often be needed to help Advance through another so all the resources you’re collecting never feel purely segregated into their own isolated mini gamess the time limit of each day helps a lot in nudging the player into realizing how each section of gameplay works together it’s also important to realize that this is a game that doesn’t benefit much from highly efficient play the minmax syndrome that many players myself included suffer from after years of playing games stard Valley starts off with your character getting sick of their City Life in a soulless job they’ve recall a letter given to them by their deceased grandfather and his advice to only open it when they’ve reached that tiresome moment it’s the DED to a farm the game is about escaping the drudgery of routine that the main character has found themselves in I doubt this is intentional but I’ve come to consider this to also mean taking a break from the high tension minmax games that I usually Play Because stardo Valley is at its best when you approach it like that a relaxing game that you play at your own pace there are four seasons each only lasts one month each month only lasts 28 days and each day has 15 real life out of game minutes for you to accomplish everything you want to do in that day there’s also an energy bar that limits how much you can exert yourself which you’re able to replenish by eating food if you take these limitations as a challenge to squeeze every bit of progress that you possibly can out of every second then I don’t think you’re going to have an enjoyable time with this game as a challenging second playthrough sure I can see how it could be fun and it might even be something I try myself someday but upon First Learning and playing the game these systems provide you both with a daily morning schedule and incentive to do different things since energy usage will be the bottleneck in the early game and exploring and foraging in the areas around your farm has no energy cost only time something you have an excess at this stage this makes the game into a cycle of days which I found incredibly easy to slip into playing for hours there’s also the especially devious trick the game pulls by only saving at the end of each day which is Fair since they’re so short but the more is usually when many events happen visitors letters checking your crops and television for updates I found myself checking on things in the morning after deciding to stop playing and ended up roped into completing another day without realizing it and those days go on and on this game has a lot of content for its $15 US price tag it’s not just the repetitive cycle of farming fishing mining Etc as I said earlier I don’t want to spoil any surprises in the review section of this video I’ll only say that the game kept getting larger after I was sure it wouldn’t anymore and the amount of events with the town’s people and extra task impress me again and again depending on your play style and how much of a completionist you want to be I’d estimate you’d get anywhere from 50 to 100 hours out of the game even more than that if you like to experiment with different layouts and Industry types for your farm however the game isn’t perfect I want to talk about some of its flaws and also briefly go into detail on some of those spoilers consider the video to be cut in half at this point if what I’ve said so far has intrigued you stop watching and give it a try you can come back and watch this part after you formed your own opinions on it stardew Valley was developed by concerned ape who is just one guy it’s a one-man project by Eric Barone some reviewers and critics tend to go easy on indie games and I try to avoid doing that it all comes down to price for me Indie Games don’t cost Indie dollars I am far more willing to accept less than AAA polish although that might be an oxy more often than not these days when it’s attached to less than AAA prices they need to be held to a relative standard same goes for solo projects is it impressive that Eric Bron made this game by himself absolutely but that doesn’t mean you should ignore problems that may have arose because of that the best comparison I can make is with a town Builder banished which was also mostly a solo project that game suffered heavily from a lack of content in its endgame in fact once you learned how it all worked there was hardly anything else to do thankfully stard Valley doesn’t suffer from this problem it has tons of Secrets and Extras that didn’t have to be in the game but were lovingly included anyway it’s that lack of Polish that’s the biggest issue and that some features didn’t get a crucial final pass of refinement there aren’t many bugs early on but the controls can be awkward with the gam pad especially there always seemed to be this conflict between using tools and weapons with the game not sure if it wanted my cursor pointed in a direction or my character turning on an indicator for what Tyler was aiming at helped but it didn’t solve the issue you collect so many different types of resources and items and have to use a long line of boxes to store them all I’ve said this in a few videos now and I’ll probably keep saying it inventory management is something that a lot of developers include without really wondering why there are only two reasons to ever limit what the player can carry an attempt at realism or to limit resources for difficulty or some sort of challenge that difficulty being restoration items for combat or distress decisions on what loot or weapons to carry in a dungeon run stard Valley has neither of these things you do carry around healing items but you can stack food to effectively infinite level so it’s irrelevant I don’t mind so much how you run out of room when going into the mines and if the game had limited your inventory in only these sections for each run through them it could have also kept the unlockable backpack upgrades for more progression but the way it works now results in over a dozen boxes filled with crap which always leads to inventory dyslexia where you forget where you put things or can’t see a stack of something hidden with the rest a quick solution for some of this would have been a separate resource tracker for raw materials wood stone coal Etc they could be considered always available to you and stored in your farm instead like resources in an RTS game that alone might be enough for the other issues I’d like to list them out as follows farm animals fishing in the museum collection interacting with the town’s people marriage and the lack of an ending farm animals relate to the TDM I just mentioned with inventory management a lot of the work you have to do on your farm in the morning can be automated like sprinklers for crops maybe this is because I just played factorio but I wish this would have also been extended to some of the furnaces and other refinement machines it’s not a big problem but inserting objects into these things crosses the line from mindless busy work to boring for me tending to your animals doesn’t just cross that same line it bounds over it and runs into the sunset the issue is compounded by how much work is needed to set them all up and how little reward you get for it money isn’t the easiest thing to come by in the early game so building a barn or a coupe and then purchasing the animals or the means and the time required to breed them is a big investment and each building can double the base amount of work you have to do at the beginning of each day you need to feed all the cows and chickens then you have to pick up all the eggs and milk each individual cow you also need to pet them all to increase their happiness which can also be done by setting up a large outdoor field and then letting them go outside and eat fresh grass instead of hay feeding can be automated with such a field if you upgrade your buildings to level three the highest level then hay dispensers also automate feeding but collecting eggs or milking cows or searing sheep is something you always have to do every morning if you want the products to sell this might be okay for some people it’s part of having a farm right the thing that kills it for me is that these products don’t sell for much it’s so much trouble for very little profit fields are difficult to maintain since the animals tend to munch it all away in lines instead of in random patches so every day there’s always less grass to spread and grow for the next day keeping an outside field to produce more hay takes a lot of space then on top of that the animals are buggy they’re meant to be happier when let outside but this always without fail made my cows produce significantly less milk and my chickens lay less eggs it’s like something goes wrong when they go outside the problem could also be with me in that it made sense for every type of animal to have their own Barn one home for pigs another for rabbits one Coupe for ducks and so on and so forth this meant a lot of animals to care for and a lot of space taken up you also need to go through so many building Cycles with the local Carpenter since you need to build the first level of the building and then upgrade it twice for 2 or 3 days of waiting each time before it’s fully set up I would have vastly prefer the ability to build a level three Barn from scratch for extra cost instead of all of this waiting in the end the pigs were the only animals that were worth it truffle s for a lot and they need to be let outside to produce them so the issue the other animals have is avoided the ability to hire a farm hand from town could have solved this someone to collect all the things for you at a reduced profit rate I feel like this might have been intended in some way with the Kent character who shows up in the second year and is constantly asking about your farm and laments that he has nothing to do for fishing in the museum they’re somewhat related problems some reviewers have criticized the fishing mini game and I’m not sure that I agree I think it’s fairly fun and simple there’s a small amount of Mastery involved in the system that makes you have to pay at least a little attention I think the issue most have with it are when the fish abruptly shift on the meter the harder fish will snap all over the place and it feels unfair this could definitely have been done better but it’s not enough to ruin the Min game for me the reason it’s on this list then is that it’s underdeveloped compared to the other major paths the game has there’s a collection and a menu to complete but nowhere to display your best catches or an exhibit like the artifacts in the museum It ultimately feels like filler that’s in the game so there’s always something for you to do if you run out of time to go to the mon or something but still have some energy left in the day just go to a lake and just throw some casts out to get some fish to sell the final goal is to catch the five legendary fish but there’s nothing to do with them you get one of the better rewards the game has to offer for catching them all a star drop that permanently increases your energy meter but I think something else could have been better maybe a small Lake to the left of your farm or something in the forest where you can set up your own fishing Hatchery with collected eggs or something as you level up the lake by doing this you increase the quality drops you get by leaving crab pots in it the museum has the opposite problem your tasked with digging up relics and enals and bringing them to make a display for the Creator and this part of the game is so bad that I suspect it’s broken eventually you’ll be after the final dozen or so of the most elusive artifacts they come from randomly spawning tiles of soil that are marked with three worms the wiki for the game says that the drop chance for some of these items is below 1% and I believe it I gave up on trying to find them all after going to every area for whole seasons and not finding a single new artifact what makes it worse is that old ones still drop and they’re useless it’s more clutter and waste the solution here would be to slightly increase the drop rate and to make it so you you can’t get the same artifact again until you’ve gotten them all or ever really the biggest problem the game has is arguably the town’s people the way they presented to you is downright overwhelming a quest has thrown at you to introduce yourself to everybody and they all have their own schedules and routines so good luck keeping track of who you have and haven’t met when you aren’t familiar enough to tell them apart yet then there’s the bewildering Quirk that talking to shop owners to buy and sell things doesn’t count so you have to Waddle behind the counter to talk specifically to them whenever you want to interact which I liked at the end since it meant I didn’t have to go through a menu to decide whether I want to shop or talk but at the beginning it’s odd having a conversation on your first meeting no matter what would have worked there’s also the problem of shopkeepers leaving the purchase point for no reason and not going back even though the store is open which is unbelievably frustrating when you have something important to buy and Pierre is having a staring contest with the shelf or Marne is eating everything in her kitchen befriending everyone is the most timeconsuming thing in the game and it’s also one of the worst you have to find out what people like and give them presents the only way I could figure this out was through trial and error and you can only give two gifts a week so it’s not something you can spam your way through after you’ve established yourself and can afford all these presents your character becomes this Relentless bi-weekly Santa Claus storming into town gifts already raise Zelda style above their heads ready to be thrown into the arms of whichever villager you see first you have to do this many many times in order to even start being friends with some people notice board tasks help a little as do gifting things on people’s birthdays but the process still takes far too long the core gripe I have with it is that it shouldn’t exist at all or at least it shouldn’t be the primary way you befriend someone there are events that trigger when you reach a level of Friendship with people and I was often surprised by how much work went into all these interactions and into making each person in stardew Valley have their own unique personality if I had to guess I would say that this must have been one of the most timeconsuming parts of making this game there’s so much work with their schedules dialogue and having it continue to make sense throughout all the holiday events that happen each season these conversations and situations where you often have to make a decision and try to help someone are gated Behind These heart levels gated behind giving these presents sense when doesn’t it make more sense that these types of conversations would happen first and you naturally align and make friends and enemies with their outcomes gifts could have been a complimentary part done afterwards or to smooth over conflicts it’s a real shame because it takes so much time and effort to get to these when they add so much to the characters once you finally do see them this directly relates to marriage so let’s move right to that the game gives you too many options I like the choice I think there’s 10 in total you can enter into a relationship with any of them regardless of your gender as far as I understand it anyway I chose Penny on my playthrough and you go through through the same friendship routine with presents and hearts I had to give her so many emeralds that I think I had an easier time getting married in real life because these interactions are the same regardless of whether you’re going for friendship or spouse it makes befriending some of the other girls a little awkward after you do get married the wedding ceremony is fairly simple but that’s okay you don’t really go on any dates or anything then when your new spouse moves in with you they get their own addition in your house that matches their personality this is good unfortunately then they all become the same Stepford wife or Stepford husband I guess they lose their personalities and some of their schedules nothing replaces this either there are no unique marriage events that I witnessed you can choose to have children and the way it’s brought up is with a black screen then when your wife or you give birth it’s announced with the same screen and text that you get when one of your cows gives birth in the night it’s not fair to expect something elaborate but it’s so strange that this was chosen to be a feature when it doesn’t go anywhere or do anything and that’s why I said there are too many options for every new choice of partner the amount of work required to make marriage interesting grows and it only affects a slim portion of every player it’s hard to justify or expect the develop veler to put that work in I would have honestly preferred just two choices if it meant there was a path that had worthwhile events and options and the like this part of the game is also buggy Stepford wife becomes accurate when Penny starts acting like a glitching robot calling me an arrow symbol instead of my name or no name at all or saying it’s hot outside when it’s in the middle of winter or accusing me of not doing any work outside because there were no crops for her to water which you might think is a bug because I had sprinkler set up but no there’s a separate response for that when she Praises you for having the farm running smoothly you both leave the baby at home unattended all day a baby that can crawl through the walls and generally act like a wide-eyed Poltergeist it’s weird it’s the only part of the game that feels unfinished and combined with the rest of the town’s people it’s the game’s biggest flaw finally let’s talk about the endgame there’s no credits that roll after you’re done although it would be hilarious to see the same name over and over again instead stard Valley is a game that you stop playing when you’ve decided you’ve had enough the closest thing that the game has to a final sequence is at the beginning of your third year when your grandpa’s ghost comes back to judge your progress if you max out his appraisal you receive a special statue this is a very useful item for acquiring endgame ore but well if you craft the placeable stairs you can get very low very quickly in the bottomless dungeon and find more ore than you’ll ever need anyway it’s still a decent reward though I don’t mind the lack of a set ending I think the game suits it but I do wish there was more to do when you get established once you get experience with a certain industry whether you find a way to stomach keeping all the farm animals or get an ancient fruit Brewery going you’re swimming in gold and have no real reason to do much else I set up what I considered to be a fairly good-looking farm and then didn’t have much else to do and that’s when I saw stop playing the community center is another thing that could be considered an ending as is capping out all your skills in fishing foraging combat Etc it’s another way all the gamescore features are intermingled into a greater package but I’d also like a more advanced more difficult version of the community center large projects that require a lot of resources for a fun perhaps gamebreaking rewards so things get nuts at the end that also need specific Farm types to complete like hundreds of cloth and hay to make a supreme scarecrow that has full coverage of your farm a giant sprinkler that does the same thing or a time machine that can set the freeze time while you’re on the farm screen your own bath house to recover energy an allseason fruit tree rapid grow grass fields fun things like that which can’t really break the game too badly because you’re already finished with it maybe they couldn’t be built until passing Grandpa’s test what it comes down to is that I had so much fun playing this game that I wanted more to do and I just want to be clear on that I spent more time in this video going over some flaws in the game because I like to explain myself and show examples that doesn’t mean the game has more bad than good far from it my favorite moments were those unexpected unlocks and discovery I mentioned at the start of the video from minor ones like the playable games of the arcade to Major one I found the secret note in the bus tunnel an opening way to the desert area in the casino I had no idea the game had so much more than just farming fishing and Mining all with their own list of things to do and rewards the community center was fantastic and I can imagine another version of this game that didn’t have it and that game would still be pretty good yet it still exists with its updated Sprite work when you complete an area just like how the valley is also altered season to season these discoveries always felt significant the greenhouse especially I also really like the books you could dig up which were a mix of tutorial elements and Discovery like you were unearthing Secrets instead of just getting popup notifications to give you hints on what to do the improvements I’d like to see happen are significant aside from bug fixes they’re not necessary to make stardy Valley a great game it’s already that I hope that they come in an expansion that has the same amount of care and attention that the game has already received so far thank you for watching my next video should be out next week it’s on the witness and will be less structured than my previous stuff it’s more thoughts on the game than anything else I’m trying something a little new and it might fail horribly so wish me luck please like And subscribe if you want to see more videos like this patreon is here if you want to support me and more videos should be on the screen in a little bit if you want to keep watching see you next time

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jph_anderson

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JosephAnderson

Books: http://www.amazon.com/Joseph-Anderson/e/B006XDCXPI/

A reasonably thorough review on a fantastic game. If you like these types of progression games then I feel safe in recommending Stardew Valley without any hesitation. You should play it before watching the video to experience some of the better surprises yourself.