Stardew Valley

I can't think of another game where I've played from the start again and again just for fun and felt the same level of enjoyment each time. With well-refined gameplay mechanics and various fun activities even outside of farming, you'll always feel like each day in the game was full to the very last minute. I loved Harvest Moon on the SNES and PS1 as a kid, but Stardew Valley has taken the crown and is definitely my favorite in the Farming Sim RPG genre!

I played SNES Harvest moon and this is just like that only with a 100x the content. The only down side is I feel like there is too much content and never enough time to explore it all.

This game has a bit of everything: resource gathering, combat, building, crafting, farming, collecting, and even relationship building. You have goals, large and small, which will compel you to keep playing, although none of them a really time-critical. Little surprises await you around every corner (at least at first). Combat is an optional thing, or at least one can plan ahead for it since it only occurs in certain places, great if you are in the mood for a relaxing game. This game is so engaging that it got me through a VERY stressful recent crisis in my life when I needed a good distraction. Highly recommended.

It’s a nice game but it has too much Skinner box mechanics. I really liked the atmosphere and the NPCs. But I’ve found myself doing a lot of repetitive things like planting and watering crops every day, fishing for the same king of fishes, just moving here and there every day that distracted me from the interesting parts of exploring the world and crafting.

Buy it for the first bits of obsessive playing but don't be surprised when it turns into a major grind-fest. I'd say this is just about on par with every other Harvest Moon game. At first it's fascinating, running around and discovering all the new things, meeting all the people, never enough time to do everything so you do a little bit at a time. Then you eventually work yourself up until you have your farm animals and your greenhouse, and you're working toward completing your collections, then you realize you're almost three years in and you've missed half the recipes because you don't remember to watch TV (and there is no other way to get them and they cycle every other year) as well as missed several other guide-dang-its, and you still need to kill at least 300 of a particular monster to collect a thing, and it's almost time for the third fair and you're seriously thinking about pulling the same stuff from storage for your grange display that won you first place the year before (or possibly not even going to the fair at all because they'll all say the exact same dialogue over again anyway), and every morning you're following the same pattern taking care of the milking, the egg gathering, and the sheering, the endless petting of the animals and trying to get their happiness up for the best quality products which will never happen anyway because every stinkin' time it rains they take a happiness hit from being in the barn all day, and suddenly you're bored to tears. P.S. Real milk cows stand nicely in a stanchion to be milked, chickens lay eggs in nest boxes, rabbits give birth, and NONE of them need petted!