A Near-Perfect Masterpiece Stardew Valley, Yet I Still Find Flaws

The near-perfect masterpiece Stardew Valley still has thorns for some. That oddball is me.

The game’s story is very simple: the protagonist originally works for Joja Corporation, and the dull oppression of city life makes him recall a mysterious envelope left by his grandfather—it turns out to be a farm in Stardew Valley. Borrowing a quip from a certain philosopher, it’s about giving up the 9-to-5 urban grind for a 24/7 small-farmer life. Joja Corporation itself feels like a Walmart-Amazon hybrid, a jab that comes naturally considering the creator lives in Seattle. Although I know I can hardly manage a real farm, I still try to slip into the character and experience this new life journey.

The very first quest hit me like a brick. Mayor Lewis, my grandfather’s old friend, asked me to introduce myself to all the residents. As a shut-in new to town who couldn’t even find my way around, I really didn’t feel like going door to door. Why couldn’t I tidy up my new home first and wait for the neighbors to stop by? After I reluctantly cleared the patch in front of the house and went out to visit people, I was stunned again: you can just push open a neighbor’s door and walk in—whether the owner is home or not, though you need a certain friendship level to enter the bedroom. This kind of thing does happen in the countryside, but usually the door is left open, not closed and waiting for you to barge in.

From there the progression falls into a rhythm similar to Minecraft: farming, fishing, mining, and then figuring out how to automate everything. But isn’t it contradictory to chase automation in a game about escaping reality and returning to small-scale farming? Of course, how much or how fast you earn doesn’t really matter; no one is rushing you. One main conflict in the game is Joja opening a store right in Stardew Valley, shelves packed with goods, employees listless—it’s the symbol of modernization and assembly lines, the player’s greatest enemy, if you choose to see it that way. Once you buy a membership, Joja will repurpose an abandoned building in town as a warehouse, using economies of scale to offer villagers cheaper products and maximizing the farmer-protagonist’s profits. That abandoned building was originally the town’s community center, abandoned because everyone now entertains themselves at home. There, the protagonist encounters a mysterious force akin to spirits that can also boost efficiency, provided you offer some harvests through arcane rituals.

Joja stands for modernizing power, so what does the mysterious force stand for? Nature or tradition? I’m deeply dissatisfied with this design. I really hate when games forcibly shove gods in. It’s not that I reject Western fantasy—if it’s a fantasy RPG from the get-go, fine; I know my way around European and American dungeon tropes. And it’s not that I can’t accept surreal settings—it’s unreasonable to expect a game to replicate real farming one-to-one, so a 28-day season where crops go from planting to harvest in just a few days makes perfect sense. But a game about escaping the city and returning to the countryside, brimming with pointed real-world meaning, suddenly stirs in a mysterious force—it’s like biting into a cake and finding your most hated fruit. Americans, I’m begging you, stop cramming gods into every story!

Here is my “let me do it myself” version. In the opening, the protagonist codes at a famous internet company, earning a high salary yet feeling oddly empty and exhausted. By chance, he quits, inherits his grandpa’s cottage, and returns to a countryside both familiar and strange. On the first day, the village committee happens to hold a production meeting. The party secretary introduces this college graduate back from the city to everyone, and amid a chorus of welcome, production tasks are assigned—lighter ones and with guidance, considering the protagonist knows nothing about farm work.

The original game’s energy and time system acts as a constraint; energy can be endlessly refilled by eating and also restored by sleeping, so gameplay leans toward pure optimization, pursuing maximum profit. If I were designing it, the protagonist’s income would come from farming and government subsidies, but three meals a day would cost money, making it a kind of survival game. With money you can buy ingredients and cook, and once your cooking skill is high enough, even invite neighbors over for meals; without money, you’d have to eat in the production team canteen. You thought going back to the countryside for easy farming would be simple? Think again.

The story would evolve accordingly. At first the protagonist farms and harvests on his own, full of joy. But over time he realizes it’s hard to accumulate wealth and improve quality of life. Educated and familiar with modernization, the protagonist would naturally think of automation, scaling up the farm, and boosting efficiency. Through the village head, various classic NPCs become accessible: a blacksmith who can modify bicycles or even tractors, a merchant who regularly travels between town and country, and so on. The original’s social system is great and worth drawing from: the protagonist learns villagers’ preferences through conversation, raises friendship with gifts and dinner invitations, and can also raise friendship by holding seminars or book clubs to spread knowledge. Once friendship is high enough, he can unite villagers’ land and push for concentrated production.

With production capacity soaring, new problems follow: surplus agricultural products multiply several times over with no sales channel, leaving everyone staring helplessly as fruits and vegetables rot in the fields. That’s when the protagonist, with modern life experience, thinks of an e-commerce platform—and as luck would have it, one of the nation’s largest e-commerce companies is the very internet firm where he once worked. From then on, the once quiet little town bustles with life: trucks shuttle along newly paved asphalt roads alongside young people in private cars. The village’s old production brigade building, long abandoned, is refurbished into offices. In those cubicles sit young villagers working—some as customer service reps, some in tech. The protagonist looks up at the familiar company logo and feels as if he’s never truly escaped. But seeing the smiles on the faces of villagers finally growing prosperous, it’s as if he’s made peace with his past self.