Day Eight

• Game: ConcernedApe's Stardew Valley
• Release Month: February.
• Quick Look: Here. (Dan/Jeff)
• Started: July. (Revisit: 08/12.)

My goal of playing a different game for today's Go! Go! GOTY! - Three One Zero's VR (and non-VR, for us normals) space survival game ADR1FT - was once again foiled by my PC's spectacular maladroitness in keeping up with 2016's advancements to the Unreal Engine. I got about ten heavily lagged out notes into Debussy's Clair de Lune (which, kudos for only going for the second-most overused piece of classical music to represent space travel after Blue Danube, guys) with a pitch black screen before sighing, uninstalling the game and consigning it to my "Pfft, I Wish" folder on Steam. I should really look into some upgrades down the road. You know, in the off-chance a rich relative unexpectedly dies.

For funzies, I also tried Thekla's The Witness again. Nope. The Talos Principle people had no problems optimizing their contemplative puzzle game for weaker computers - if I could beat every puzzle in that game, some of which required some very stringent timing, then the framerate must've been tolerable - but apparently not The Witness and the relatively basic shapes and colors that go into its myriad of line-drawing puzzles. That one especially hurts, because A) I suspect it'll perform quite well in the GOTY discussions, if not perhaps jostling its way into the top ten, and B) it was a gift and I feel like I let down the gifter by being unable to play and discuss it in more depth.

So instead, we're on the "emergency" portion of this year's Go! Go! GOTY! series: the revisits. I wanted to return to three 2016 games I left in various states of "mostly complete" earlier this year, get a little bit further in all three, and use those reminders to help decide their ultimate placement on the list I'm building. The first of these revisits is Stardew Valley, which I began back in July and stopped as I entered the Autumn of my character's second year on the farm, which I inscrutably decided to name "See My True Farm".

There's no specific designer-intended conclusion to Stardew Valley: like Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing, its major influencers, you can essentially keep the loop going ad infinitum. You can max out your "skills" of farming, mining, foraging, fishing and adventuring, you can get married and have children, you can complete all the requirements to revitalize the local Community Center (or pay JojaMart for the rebuilding work, if you're a jerk), or you can completely fill out your various harvestables/fish/recipes/museum treasures/etc. collections, but none of them cause balloons and a big banner to float down with a "hey, ya beat it, 'grats" message. The earliest you can accomplish the last of those goals is at the end of the second year, due to the way you are given new recipes every Sunday from a cooking show until two whole years have passed at which point they start repeating. The end of the second year also carries with it a special event that essentially rates how your first two years as a farm-owner have gone, with special awards for completing various milestones. For the purposes of this revisit, I'm going to resume where I left the game and reach that event before putting Stardew down to rest once more. (There's also been a whole lot of DLC since July I've been wanting to check out, and I figured I'd write something close to its imminent console release for anyone who might've forgotten all about it.)

At least, that was the plan. I forgot how long a day is in this game; it's super long, though paradoxically never long enough. The month-long seasons the game gives you actually take a considerable amount of time to complete, and so I've only reached the start of Winter. The seasonal creep is made slightly more nerve-wracking by how so many resources, either grown/harvested or foraged from the surrounding environs, will only appear on a specific month. I can get around the farming one thanks to an expensive greenhouse that lets me raise seasonal crops all year round, but I still need the seeds. When you leave a season, you aren't going to see it again any time soon, so it's imperative you get everything you need out of it. I wasn't paying attention to ingredients I'd need to cook every one of the game's recipes, so there's little chance of me Julie & Julia-ing it with a bunch of missing Spring and Summer ingredients in the middle of Autumn.

Speaking of time, the march is quite swift: even with my farm packed with Iridium Sprinklers, which does most of the legwork with regards to watering the crops, I still spend entire mornings on farm duties. Most of that is the livestock, milking the cows and goats and collecting the eggs from chickens and ducks, though I usually have to whip around the greenhouse for some watering and to the batcave to see what the Joker's been up to collect any fruit that appeared in there. Then I have just enough time to wander around the map looking for digging spots - a full museum collection of buried treasure is one of the few things I've left to complete - doing a spot of fishing or figuring out where someone is so I can give them a birthday present before it turns to night and I have to hike it back home.

I've been particularly interested in the new additions added by a recent "version 1.1" patch. Some, like the new quests and environments, took their time to make themselves evident - I had to wander over to the right part of the map to trigger the event, and then it required a fetch quest chain to unlock both the new regions. Others, like being able to buy rare Void Eggs from the sewer vendor, purchasing expensive catalogues for my home that lets me furnish them however I wish for free, and changing the color of storage chests to make it easier to identify the contents were seized upon immediately. I still wish the game had character icons on the map to make them easier to track down: there's a mod for it, but since the patch went through none of the mods I had seem to work any more. They weren't gamebreaking stuff, but I miss the convenience.

It was surprisingly easy to jump back into the farm after a few months. I'd completely forgotten what gifts everyone likes - I still have a Google doc spreadsheet bookmarked for that purpose, fortunately - and when certain events would occur on specific days of the weeks. Not calendar events, since the game does at least give you a calendar for those, but events like the Travelling Cart in the woods south of your farm which is only open Fridays and Sundays, and the cooking show on Sundays. Some vendor characters aren't available on certain days also, like on Tuesdays (they're all doing calisthenics at the general store). Beyond that, though, most of my daily schedule immediately came back to me - including checking the tappers for new treeasures (that would be tree treasures, if you're not an awful human being) and refilling the crab pots on the beach after they've given me my thousandth worthless bit of seaweed.

I still maintain that the game is fantastic, albeit in a situational manner of speaking. Days like today, where I haven't played in a while and am enjoying exploring the new content, mean I can run around for in-game weeks indulging in the game's many systems and bucolic flavor, whereas on a number of days back in July while I was still playing it religiously, I'd perhaps play a few in-game days and then put it away to spend my free time elsewhere. It's an elegant system, requiring as little or as much time as you're willing to put in to still deliver a satisfying gaming session regardless of your length choice. I'm also a big fan of any game that introduces a myriad of systems and has them all flow back into each other in various ways; Dark Cloud 2, which is probably still my favorite game of all time, did this marvellously by how procuring prizes in the fishing or golf side-activities gave you money and resources for the main dungeon-crawling and town-building gameplay. Even if you chose to spend the entire session dithering on non-critical goals instead of moving on with the game's story, you were still earning many items to make that process easier on yourself when you finally did return to it. With Stardew, there is no "critical" path to follow, and so the whole game is that symbiotic dithering. It works, though.

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