An unexpected gem.

Accidents happen

    However, they are not necessarily bad occurrences. Thanks to Humble Bundle Monthly I have picked up Stardew Valley. It was a total surprize for me, as I just forgot to cancel my monthly payment.

    Ever since this game came out I was very skeptical about it. Me, playing a farming game? No way. For some inexplicable reason though, I have decided to add it to my library and try it out. May I add, that on the launch day of the game, I did "feel" the "hype" for it and all good reviews and videos did convince to try it out. I never have bought it though nor tried it out in any way and after a couple of days I had forgotten about it.

I was so wrong.

 

    I have almost missed out completely on a great, great game. Enough about the mystical chance of randomness. What makes the game so great?

Divided interests, socialization, pacing. 

 

 

 First and foremost, the most important piece of this game is the pacing. You will start with "just tools" and you progress over time. Overall there's 1+4 qualities, where 1 is the standard without a prefix of any sort or material.

The fact that you have to pay gold in order to upgrade your tools, does set the pacing in quite a nice timeline. Farming certain resources does not provide that much of progress.

While game has numerous skills, don't worry! It makes sure you will train every single one of it over time. Sure, you can without question focus every skill, however it is not quite efficient. Thanks to skills and perks, craftables locked behind them, game sets its pace for the game alongside the story and season system.

If not for the skills, game most certainly would become very boring after just a couple of hours.

However, there's one more pacing system that slows your progress a little. That's the Community Centre. In short: you have to forage, gather, obtain certain items that require objects from certain season. This locks the game and paces it out in an additional, story way, while skill system is more of a character progression pacing. It can be a little irritating at times, for sure, especially if you do not remember what you are supposed to gather/focus, as if for example, you will not gather one singular crop this season, you will be forced to wait for next season to plant and collect certain crop. It usually unlocks new locations that are crucial to progress in the Centre itself.

TLDR: Pacing is set by skill, season and Community Centre system. It stops, locks you at certain points so you are unable to power through a part of the game. However, if you miss a single thing, you will get stuck one of certain points for a longer of time, however you can still make progress in different branches. 

Socialization

In short, you can date, marry, romance with certain characters and gain friendship in order to be granted certain bonuses, for example new recipes for certain meals. It is not crucial, however it is still recommended to socialize with NPC for bonuses. It will unlock special quests as well as events to provide  background on certain characters or to bound player to the NPC. However, NPC interactions, besides the events, are usually dull. Most NPC's for example share the response for receiving a gift they like which breaks all depth that was given to this point.

Married or not, does not affect the game in a very major way, unless you want to have kids. Yes, that's possible, but come on, why would you? 

Not without problems

I'd like to mention a few problems that occur very, very often for me while playing the game.

The biggest problem here is: very unresponsive movement and action. It comes all to this:

 When you stand surrounded by crops, ores etc. it works fine, where you point it automatically turns your character to interact with that object and comply a certain action.

However, while you're "in combat", as in "holding/equipping/using" a weapon, this does not work that way. You attack the way you are currently facing. I do not see a problem with not being able to strafe and attack, as attacks occur in 1 animation, but not being able to swiftly change direction by pointing your mouse in a different way, makes the combat feel cheap.

That's not the end though. You cannot see any bars or countown for how long the attack or any action animation takes.  So, as an example, you're mining some ore and suddenly a wild group of bats show up. You will have problems to switch from your pickaxe to your sword, if this action takes less than about 0.8-1 second. You cannot do it. You will have to wait a second in order to be able to switch your gear! But still, you will have to change direction manually with wasd and again, this, if the action is quick enough on your side, will not happen! Makes it even worse when you are actually surrounded, it's just cheap and bad.

You thought that's all? Nope! Every weapon has one additional secondary attack or other addition. I prefer swords, as on RMB you can defend yourself from incoming enemies and damage for a very short period of time. I've been in numerous situations, where it was required from me to change from my current gathering gear, swap to my sword and block. 60% of the time I was  not even able to swap because of fast reaction but if I did I had maybe 10% chance of successfully blocking the attack, as again, the delay is unacceptable. 

Unless you have really, really good gear, it makes visits to the mine a rather unpleasant experience. There are times where the game throws 8 bats at you at once. It results in very, very cheap deaths as you know your reaction time is better than this, and you should not be able to die because simply the game is extremely unresponsive for fast actions. I do not care that combat is not the focus of the game, it should not be this bad and this cheap to die, just because the game engine limits your potential.

All that said

  

I did quite give up on it. Why? After 1st year I've found myself begin in a stagnating stance. You see, this game is all about the busywork. You even have to pet your farm animals every single day. Let them, let them in etc. In theory your wife can pet the animals. But for the most part, not all of them will be pet, so "just to be sure" you have to pet them all anyway... Sprinklers are extremely useful when making a farm, it sure does take out tons of minutes of your precious time. I think Stardew Valley is a good game, but for people who have little or no time (or study something for that matter) is not a great game, as it can be stressful and if you forget to do a certain task, it will not hold the progress but rather erase some of your wasted time. 

If you have alot of time to spare, this game is most certainly for you.