In 8 years, Stardew Valley never lost sight of its core philosophy

03.04.2024 - 19:25 / polygon.com / Nintendo

When I got the chance to review Stardew Valley for Polygon in 2016, I had no idea how huge it would become. What I found during my review period was a quiet, succinct, and engrossing game about doing chores, which didn’t feel all that genre-defining. It was a great game, and over the years I would get it on two additional platforms (Nintendo Switch and mobile), but I didn’t look at it as a “game of the decade” contender.

Turns out, people really like doing chores.

It’s always tough to tell when a game is going to cross the desired line between generally great and generationally influential. Sometimes a game is too niche to find a large audience, even if it’s a masterpiece, or maybe it doesn’t age well. It’s occasionally easy to tell when a game will be considered a “game of the decade” contender at release — usually if it comes from a legacy studio and wins a ton of awards — and that wasn’t Stardew Valley, at least at first.

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Eight years later, the game, created by solo dev Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone about moving to a small rural town and starting a farm, has become a global phenomenon. It’s sold over 30 million copies, it’s been released on PC, mobile, Nintendo Switch, and consoles, and it basically kicked off the whole “cozy games” genre that’s still flourishing today. It’s also received six major updates, with the most recent, 1.6, adding new events, new dialogue, and a new farm type and fleshing out the endgame. Over eight years later, Stardew Valley is still thriving, and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

All of this is despite how it easily could’ve vanished under the glut of giant AAA adventures and seemingly more mainstream experiences. After all, at the time of its release, the farming and crafting sim genre was mostly relegated to Nintendo systems, with franchises like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon, or to highly accurate PC simulators, like the Farming Simulator series. Nobody was making a game where you just grow crops and talk to people. Even worse, while Stardew Valley came out in February — earlier than most major releases in 2016 — that year was a truly excellent year for games, and Stardew had to compete with some of late-2015’s releases, including Fallout 4, Halo 5, and Undertale. It still landed on the Steam’s bestsellers chart shortly after release.

I and many others went on to sink hundreds of hours into Stardew Valley — growing crops, romancing NPCs regardless of gender (a rarity in games like this at the time), smashing rocks for treasure, and uncovering all of the game’s many secrets. That’s a lot to do, which makes hitting triple-digit hour counts easy. However, what separated Stardew from the pack is that all of these tasks satisfyingly mesh with each other.