Alright. Does doing chores like mowing the lawn with a scythe, chopping down trees, and breaking apart rocks sound like a good time? Okay, how about planting yourself a little garden you have to get up and water every single day? How about walking around the beach picking up seashells? What if you use that old fishing pole the old sea dog Willy down by the docks give you to catch bass up by the lake? How about exploring those old caves and mining for copper ores? What about taking all the money you made selling fish and all that copper you mined to make yourself a new watering can? Then planting a bigger garden. Then buying a coop with a few chickens. Then making mayo with those eggs. Then getting a better pickaxe so you can go deeper in the mines to find iron, gold, and fucking dwarves. Then a fairy comes and magically makes your crops grow. Then you find out the old community center is full of little magic "rats" who'll fix the mine carts or that old boarded up greenhouse for you in exchange for random shit you find lying around. Then you build yourself a little sprinkler system so you don't have to spend time watering every day. Then you buy yourself some cows, some sheep, some pigs, some ducks, some rabbits. Then a wizard will ask you to find his estranged wife. Then you find out that drunk dude in town will turn your chickens blue if you marry him (see header).

You wake up, every day, and do chores. Every day, the same dream. But it just keeps snowballing. Some days it rains and you spend that time you saved watering your plants in the mines. Eventually your farm is just a vehicle for money you tend to at the beginning of the month and you spend all day talking to people in town. Eventually you take a bus to the desert. You hatch a dinosaur egg. A witch turns one of your chickens evil. You catch a lava eel from the red lake deep in the mines. The feedback loop in this game is the most satisfying thing. You go from having like $500 to your name that you blow on like 12 cauliflower seeds to spending hundreds of thousands on a wine cellar so you can squeeze every last ounce of profit from your greenhouse full of ancient fruits that you cultivated from one rare seed to dug out of the ground on a rainy fall afternoon. Saki and I combined (we both played our own farms and have a co-op farm as well) spent well over 300 hours on this game. And while I feel like we squeezed every last drop out of this game, there's still that itch every once and a while to go back and improve your farm just a little bit more.

I loved it. We'd come home from work, eat, and then just get lost in Stardew Valley, and there was always something new, and it was always cozy.

This game came out in 2014 but it hands down my favorite game I played this year.