“Got the seeds, going to plant it behind the shed, OK?”
“Sure. Don’t forget to put the tools back in the brown chest.”
“I just put it somewhere, yes.”
“Brown chest please.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Sorry, but I have a system. Tools go in the brown chest, water-related stuff is in the blue chest, stuff that we grew but do not sell is in the green chest, presents are in the red chest, minerals are in the yellow chest, weapons and other combat stuff are in the black chest.”
“All right, the tools are in one of those.”
Stardew Valley is a pixel-art farming simulator game with some light RPG and even lighter combat elements, originally published in 2016. At the start of the game, you inherit a deserted farm from your grandfather, and, being fed up with your soulless corporate job, you travel there to start a new life. You are greeted by the friendly locals, move into the tiny cottage on your land, buy 15 seeds of parsnip, and take it from there. You start by clearing your farm of boulders and trees, then you plant the crops, water them every day, and after a few days, harvest and sell them in the local shop. And repeat. Buy some seeds, maybe some different types this time, plant, water, harvest, sell. Clear up even more land, get multiple crops, tidy up your farm, create roads, get better tools, start raising animals, add fences so the animals don’t eat your crops.
That’s the basic stuff, but you can also socialize with the locals, get new friends, give them enough strawberries so they marry you, get involved in the community, enter contests, go fishing, explore the surrounding area, buy funny hats from a cat, get to the bottom of the bottomless mine.
In 2018, a new patch was released, that allowed you to play with up to four players on the same farm. The way it works is one of you becomes the main character, who advances the story, and the other players live in their own little shed on the farm. Or, you know, you can also be lovers, or just move in with each other, no one is judging in Stardew Valley. You are free to exchange tools and resources, and the money is common property too, anyone can spend it on a whim. So be careful who you play with. (That’s a good general advice too!) The difficulty is scaled up a bit so it doesn’t become too easy to gather everything.
The original game is great, and everyone should play it. Period. The absolute peacefulness, the beautiful music, the characters (yes, the 16×32 pixel sprites with limited written texts, they do become living characters over the course of the game), the unbeatable sense of accomplishment, the underlying lurking melancholy, the music once again because it’s so great (oh Secret Woods), all these combined made me spend almost a hundred hours in Stardew Valley, and I do not regret a minute of it. The fact that every line of code, every pixel of artwork, every note in the soundtrack was created by one guy only adds to the mystery of the game.
However, this is not a review of the original game, which, and I cannot stress this enough, I deeply love. This is a review of the multiplayer co-op experience. And, sadly, the game falls flat on that front. I usually try to avoid comparing the co-op mode to the single player mode, if it even exists, but I simply can’t help myself here, it’s like playing two completely different games. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The Good
I suppose most of the things the original game gets praised for also applies to the multiplayer mode. The whole game world is intricately built, there are subtle underlying connections between basically all the items and resources. Say you feel like you planted your share of parsnips and you want to do something different. So you try to improve your social status a bit by becoming friends with someone, and hear a rumor that they really love a special type of mineral. In order to mine the special minerals, you have to go deep in the mine, so you need special food that makes you quicker and luckier, so you save up enough for a kitchen so you can cook the food for yourself. You also need better gear, so you head to the adventurers’ guild to buy some, you don’t have enough money. So you go back to growing parsnips until you have enough money, but at that point, you are happy with growing stuff again.
Or we can take the fish system. There are 47 different types of fish in the game, each with their individual habitat and lifestyle. Some live in ponds, rivers, or the ocean, and they are active when it’s warm, cold, daytime, night, or raining. Collecting them all is oddly satisfying. Although in multiplayer, probably only one player needs to do that…
Music is great, artwork is great. (Although not for everyone.)
The Bad
All that is great. If only the player on the other side of the microphone was not there. Presumably you like each other IRL, however, perhaps unbeknownst to you, you are just ruining the Stardew Valley experience for each other if you are playing together.
I thought it is going to be really cute, embarking on this adventure together, peacefully farming, going on long strides, doing some fishing, seeing something getting accomplished.
Well, it’s nothing like that. As soon as you hear another human voice, the whole game world crumbles. What was previously a lovely idealistic dreamworld, where you were a bit thrown back by how the villagers behaved at first but suspended your disbelief really quickly, now the NPCs become painfully obviously just that – NPCs. Very minimalistic ones at that, they behave like strict mannequins with their four poses and two lines of dialogue. Which, once again, somehow works in single player.
The multiplayer also has one crucial change from the single player mode: there is no pause in the game, so no checking out your inventory or map or quests or just thinking of what to do in general without the clock ticking. This makes the game kinda stressful. OK, we are still just chilling and growing stuff on a farm, so how stressful this can be, but it’s miles from the single player mode’s level of chilling, at least for me.
Since time advances in real-time for all the players, including when they are in cutscenes, it can easily happen that you are stuck inside a cutscene, and at the end of it you just faint because the clock did not stop ticking, and according to the game rules you auto-faint shortly after midnight. It’s definitely not game-breaking, just something that makes you drift even farther into the vast ocean of disbelief and estrangement further away from the game’s world.
The Co-Op
When we played the game together, I had already been very familiar with the game and was close to the end, while my partner started fresh, anxious to play after seeing how I became an addict. Neither position seemed to work out great. If you have already finished the game and you play again with a noobie, everything feels like a de-saturated copy of your original playthrough, lost like the vivid memories of childhood. If, on the other hand, you are new, and playing with someone who has already become the master of the intricate system, then it feels like you are not exploring the world for yourself, you are merely following someone else. Even if the other player is nice and not bossy, there will be things you cannot explore.
It just didn’t work for us, and after a couple of hours, I went back to my solo farm, and my partner started a new one. Granted, we haven’t played in a scenario when both of us were complete noobs, and now we never can, unless both of us suffer amnesia. It might have worked out that way. But I doubt it.
The co-operative aspect of the game is surprisingly not working. I think the main reason behind that is that if you really look into it, there’s no challenge in Stardew Valley. You can’t make mistakes that have long-lasting consequences. So you made a bad business decision, then what? It’s not like you need X amount of money by time Y. The important thing is to enjoy your (virtual) life. However, without a set challenge, co-operating in this game merely means you are taking away the opportunity of doing the thing you are doing from the other player. Basically you are just competing for activities in the game.
Even putting that aside, let’s say we had some set goals, you still barely see each other through the game. In the morning, you water your crops together, discuss who buys what in the shops or at the blacksmith, and then go on your merry adventures, because you usually feel like doing something different. For example, one person might want to go to the mine, the other will do some fishing. And at the end of the day, you discuss what happened over the loading screen with the list of items you sold that day, because that’s the only time the game pauses.
The Recommendation
Nope. Not a good co-op experience for anyone.
Well, OK, that’s not necessarily true. It might be cute to play the game with small kids. I don’t know, I myself do not frequently acquaint myself with the sort. I definitely do not recommend Stardew Valley as a co-op game to anyone over the age of twelve. I hope you can tell it’s difficult for me to be so harsh. Once again, do absolutely try the game, just please play it alone, don’t ruin this wonderful experience with the presence of another human.
Info
| Release Year | 2018 |
| Genre | RPG, Simulation |
| Difficulty | Very Easy |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 1 - 99 hours |
Rating
| Overall | Bad |
| Story | Bad |
| Co-Operation | Terrible |