Stardew Valley

This game is SO relaxing. The soundtrack is awesome, the pixel graphics are superbly done, and, while it´s essentially a sandbox game, it still has some sidequests that will appeal to oldschool gamers, because you definitely need pen&paper to keep track of all the things some of the inhabitants like most, for example.

If you want a game to relax peacefully to after a long working day, then this is the game for it. I started it by now about 10 times, and it never grew old. There is no time limit, and yet, there is challenge. But nothing bad happens if you don't meet the goal. I enjoy the game together with my husband in multiplayer and we dumped 200 hours together into this game and not regret one single minute of it. Just... buy it. It's amazing, calming and great fun. And there is always something new to discover, as the game still gets updated in 2021.

It is obvious that the developer (One guy) was trying to make his vision of a harvest moon game. It has evolved into so much more. It is absolutely wonderful. It improves systems in every way I can think of and gets rid of some of the more annoying or less efficient systems in HM games. When you really get deep into the game you are rewarded with a world much larger than originally given. The lore is amazing. The mysteries are great. The characters are intriguing. It's all around the best farm-sim game you can get.

It's basically 2d Harvest Moon for PC, so if you like Harvest Moon, you'll like this. Extra bonus of this being on PC means you can mod it if you get tired of the default. I actually played it a ton years ago, stepped away, and just looked again and there's been quite a heap of updates. Good to see it is still being supported as well.

The multiplayer update is fantastic and allows multiple family members to connect with the same copy of the game. It's what you hope for, but not really expect in today's game industry. Big thanks to the developer (stilll blows my mind that this was done by a one-man team).