Stardew Valley

I have been hearing about stardew valley since last year, but only this month did I pick it up. It starts out familiar enough. Grow crops, chop trees, talk to villagers. If you're played HM or AC you'll recognize this pretty quickly. But it really evolves into something really cool. There are a TON of crops, animals, fish, mining areas, crafting and cooking recipies, things to forage, quests, combat areas, and places to spend your hard earned money. The scaling is really good, you always unlocking something new to work towards so you're never doing the same thing for too long. The excitement of unlocking useful things is great, like when you first make sprinklers meaning you don't have to water 200+ crops for 14+ days in a row . When you have a goal in mind there are always 5 sub-steps you have to do to prepare such as collecting resources or doing quests. Even in the mid to late game there is still stuff to keep you engaged for a while like achievements, very expensive and useful items and hidden secrets all around the world. Plus a strong modding community. You can also start over with a new character in a different starting farm with different materials and earn your money using different methods than last time. This game has been surprisingly addicting and fun. I didn't expect to become so engrossed with it because I usually get bored of games pretty quickly. But I can sit for hours and hours and just soak in the beautiful art style, sound track, and gameplay. The game is so good and accessible to anyone that I'll even be recommending it to my mom!

Too (extremely) time consuming, even for the main quest. Controls are cluncky in some aspects.

Stunning... One of the best games I've played in my 40yrs of enjoying the PC game experience. Just Buy it!

A really chill farming game with LOTS of thing to do, if you are into farming games like harvest moon, rune factory or story of seasons you will love this I made the error of buying it on steam so I'm waiting for GOG connect

I've put way more hours into the game than I wanted to, after recommending it to my girlfriend purely based on reviews. I'm now 75 hours into my own game and have to stop myself after reaching my last personal milestone. The graphics are charming, the music is fantastic (but can be a bit repetitive) and there's so much to do. It's up to the player what to do, and how fast to do it. Wanna be a lonely, rich farmer like myself? Sure. Wanna be a pure, but socially active farmer like my girlfriend? Sure. What makes this game even more astonishing is the fact that apparently one guy did it all on his own. I can say as a "core gamer" of 20-something years: 9.5/10 would recommend.