Stardew Valley Lets You (Metaphorically) Kill An Effigy Of Capitalism And I Just Think That’s Neat

I played a LOT of Stardew Valley last year. I got into playing it on the Switch with a friend of mine, but I’d bounced off the game a few times on the PC previously so I expected to only enjoy playing it as a means of socializing with a friend who lived far away. After all, I hadn’t disliked the game, I’d just gotten distracted and busy with other things. Playing with someone made it a lot more enjoyable, thanks to the potential for splitting up the daily tasks, but I’ll admit I struggled with how quickly the days pass when you can’t stop the clock during dialogues, cutscenes, or even the moments of transition between screens. Fishing also becomes nearly impossible because of how quickly the clock moves when you’re catching a single fish.

Eventually, I got tired of asking my friend questions about the game, of always feeling behind and uncertain of what I should be doing or preparing for in the coming days of the game. I decided to try playing solo again, in order to figure out how the game works, improve my farming efficiency, and really dig into the systems of the game on a deeper level than I could during multiplayer. Which is a great way to play the game if you understand the systems or are willing to let yourself be carried by your other player(s), but it’s not great for learning how the game works at any kind of speed since it doesn’t let you stop and think without the day passing you by. I figured I’d get maybe a year into my singleplayer game’s calendar and then fall off again. Instead, I wound up doing an entire year in the two weeks before I played with my friend again and then turned our fun, relaxed farm into an efficient, artisanal-goods-producing machine. Which was, you know, still fun. Just also incredibly profitable in a snowballing kind of way.

After getting into year three of my solo file, I fell off the game. There was still stuff to do, but I was working on increasing my understanding, efficiency, and planning. I was still experimenting with how to automate things, how to get enough of the resources I needed for stuff, and finding new things to explore in the wider world of Stardew Valley. I didn’t really get bored so much as the easy work was finished and I decided I needed a break because my nights were filled with hazy dreams about watering cans, tile selection for tool usage, and the constant grind of swapping out things being processed as they finished. If I ever go back to the game for solo play (which I probably will do, thanks to the expansive nature of the game and the creator’s penchant for continuing to release new content), I’ll probably start over and use what I’ve learned from my solo game to get optimal efficiency in my first year so I can knock out all the achievement type stuff right away and focus on the exploration, fighting, and end-game aspects. And the island. I never quite made it there, though I was right on the cusp when I fell off.

My friend and I don’t play much anymore. A mixture of increasingly busy schedules, her recent homeownership, our stress levels, and just a level of distraction with other things means we haven’t played in more months than I can easily recall. I’ve talked with other people about getting a multiplayer Stardew Vallet game set up, but it never seems to pan out. It seems like it has been difficult to find time to do such things with people lately, as everyone tries to fill out their schedules to either take advantage of the looser restrictions or fill up their evenings with entertainment as they continue to isolate from the on-going pandemic.

Which is too bad, because I could really use the escape the game offers. After all, the idea of leaving an office job behind in order to go live in a quiet little town full of interesting people who all seem receptive to newcomers (with a couple exceptions) and live off the land is incredibly appealing to me. I’d love to just check out of capitalism entirely, but the game is actually pretty reliant on capitalism since you gotta sell all your farm goods for money if you want to make any kind of advancements in the game. There’s no real bartering or community supply options.

Which, honestly, is pretty good for a video game, you know? That its only major failing is that you can’t destroy capitalism. You can destroy an effigy of capitalism though, so that’s neat. I ALWAYS pick that option. I couldn’t stand to play the game knowing I’d sold out a local community to a faceless, shitty corportation if I somehow went that route. Too real.

I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 15

Things have been rough lately. I’ve made some personal gains, but it frequently feels like the world is crumbling around us as violence, hatred, and complicit indifference take center stage to the exclusion of mere decency and tolerance. I don’t have a quick answer to those problems, I don’t have the ability to make great change by myself, and I can barely get past my own anger and trauma enough to work on taking what are (in my opinion) the bare minimum steps a decent person can take in response to the world we find ourself in. What I can do, though, is provide a small escape. So today, when I’m tired and sad because of the world we find ourselves in, let’s talk about the power of the horizon in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

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I Just Love Kirby Games So Much

I beat the main portion of Kirby and the Forgotten Land over the weekend. The game has stayed just as enjoyable throughout as it was at the start, which is pretty great considering how many games I play that feel like the beginning got way more work than the end. There’s a “post-game” section to play through that I’m spending my time on these days, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s “post” anything. It feels like the final act of the game, despite it being pretty clearly the post-game section (all but named as such by the NPCs in the game), and there isn’t all the much new content, so I can’t really argue with it being called that.

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Kirby And The Forgotten Land Is Perfect

A new Kirby game came out last week. Kirby and The Forgotten Land tells the story of what would happen if Kirby and his fellow Popstar residents got sucked through a strange rift into a world that vaguely resembles our own (in proportion and technology) perhaps a thousand years after all Humans vanished from it. Being a completionist with very little time to play video games over the past few days, I’ve only gotten to the second area, so there is likely more to the story than I’ve found before writing this. That said, the story of a Kirby game is never the reason you play it. They’re all basically the same: something bad happens, Kirby and Co. team up to save the day, and evil forces are thwarted. A story frequently told entirely without words, relying entirely on cutscenes, music, and good facial expressions to tell the story.

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Finishing Earthbound Left Me Feeling Disatisfied

I finished Earthbound last night. It took a bit longer than expected, since I wound up spending way too long in an area near the end because I was being too conservative with my resources. I was trying to get to the final boss while spending as little as possible, alternating between using the Switch’s state saving method to find a path foward with only a few encounters between the last save/healing spot and the final boss and grinding against the enemies in the same area so I’d be strong enough to easily blast through them. It was only a few hours, but that was spread across a couple nights and really cut into the building tension between the rather confusing lead up to this final area and the nightmarish final boss.

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I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 11

At one point into my first play-through of Breath of the Wild, probably at 1 or 2am on a night I had to be up early for work since that was pretty much the entire month following the release of the game, I discovered that I could hold items I’d been collecting in my hands. For whateve reason, it never occurred to me that this could serve any purpose other than to cook things over a fire. I’d, of course, discovered that you could interact with objects in the world before you picked them up, but it had never occurred to me that it might be useful to put them back into the world once I’d put them in my pockets.

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Story Dictation Or Discovery In Video Games

I’ve been playing a lot of Super Nintendo games recently. Most of which I played previously, but some for the first time thanks to them being freely available as a result of my Nintendo Online subscription. I may have started playing them because Earthbound was recently on it, but I’ve played more than just the one game. While many of them are nostalgia plays or simple, mindless enjoyment I don’t have anything interesting or useful to say about, I’ve been thinking about the approach to storytelling the games developers took in this early, limited medium.

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I Did Not Sleep Well And Now That’s Your Problem Too

Today has been rough. I apparently ate something that vehemently disagreed with me last night, but not until more than 9 or 10 hours after I finished my dinner, aka 4am. I did not get back to sleep after that and the sort of restless stress and general depression I’ve been battling this week meant I only got about 3 hours of sleep last night. Still managed most of my workout routine, though. My to-failure point on the cycling portion of my routine was about half of what I’ve done the rest of the week, but that kinda makes sense given how terribly my gastrointestinal system hurt all morning and how little sleep I got. Still, I’ve managed to keep up my routine to the best of my abilities and wasn’t even THAT late to work after all was said in done. The week is mostly over at this point, I’ll be able to rest soon, and the only stressful item left to do today is my weekly grocery shopping.

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I Miss Having An Infinite Backpack In Pokémon Legends: Arceus

I’ve been steadily working my way through Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Perhaps a bit slowly, given that I’m trying to avoid spend all of my free time doing just this one thing, but I can feel myself slowly making my way forward. At about a week in (I missed most of the first weekend thanks to being sick and wrote this a week ahead of it posting), I’ve got 8 stars, a fourth area unlocked, three fully complete Pokédex entries, and 95% seen-to-“complete” Pokédex ratio, and a party of level 60 Pokémon. I still have a great deal of content left to work through, between the plot and the Pokédex entries since there are a large number of rare Pokémon I’ve only gotten to Research level 10 because I’ve gotten a wide array of the easy-to-get research tasks. This isn’t a problem, though, because I’m still having fun, which is all that really matters.

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Returning To My Old Haunt In Animal Crossing: New Horizons

I have begun a slow return to playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I played it pretty heavily for most of 2020, kinda hit a wall of boredom in 2021, and have only played intermittently since then. The exact moment I knew I needed a break from the game was when I realized I wasn’t going to keep up my dailies because it meant I’d have to get up and change the cartridges in my Switch. That, plus my dislike for anything that makes me feel like I am obligated to play a game every day or else play at a disadvantage. I know it’s not a big deal to miss a day here or there in ACNH, which is why it lasted as long as it did, but eventually I felt tired of playing the game just to dig up a few fossils, pick some weeds, water some flowers, and talk to my island neighbors at least once.

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