Couples enjoy spending quality time with each other, but as for my husband and I, we have been enjoying spending our evening playing Stardew Valley.
The premise of the game is about an inheritance the player receives from his or her grandfather who passed away. It’s an old run down farm, so the goal is to work with what you got, improve on it, and see what you can make out of it. I really like the supernatural element to the game, which includes witches, ghosts, slimes, and monsters. They mostly come up in the quest. For a gaming newbie, I would describe this game as the much expanded version of Restaurant City where you get to create dishes for money and decorate the facility for aesthetic purposes. Activities to do on top of that, includes fishing, mining, and rebuilding dilapidated areas for the community. You also build relationships with rude neighbors whom will eventually warm out to you after very much bribing.
There are also options for the player to get married regardless of sex and skin color orientation. There are ways that this game can improve on though, such as making the spouse, children, and pets more interactive with a personality rather than just being at home and having the same repeated dialogue. Perhaps those can be future expansion that the engineers can partake in as future version development.
If you are willing to for out extra cash to make this a two player game, this is definitely an option, but playing together and coming up with strategies on improving the look and health of your farm is almost like a team building exercise for your relationship.
Isn’t that what life is but with much less pressure and having immediate gratification? There are no competition, just quests and repeated organization, inventorying and selling, which some may call it too simple, especially for the adrenaline junkies, but to me, that is a great selling point. It is a perfect game for unwinding and the visualization of a functioning business and home. I highly recommend!
