Stardew Valley
The farm sim that started it all (at least for me)
My Score: 10/10
I think I can honestly say this game got me into the whole cosy side of steam games. Before I played this game I had mainly played RPGs and before that shooting games, but I hadn't played anything coming close to this.
This game is almost perfect and really started a lot of the cosy farming games I've been playing this past year.
When I first saw this game I wasn't sure if I wanted to play a pixel game, since I hadn't played anything like this since my Pokemon days, but it didn't take long before I was completely taken in by the setting, characters and game design. There are so many things to do and you don't have to just grind the farming if you want to explore the town and other areas, meet the NPCs, dungeon delve or just waste some time while listening to some amazing music.
Once I made significant progress (year 3), I started to look up the wiki to see if I was missing anything and realised there were still more areas to unlock. The desert comes with a second dungeon and eventually the tropical island has a volcano and second farm to explore. Plus some awesome end game items to buy once you unlock the walnut room.
This game has one of the hardest fishing mechanics in it and honestly I love this. I mean I don't like too much challenge in cosy games, but having a fishing system that is more than just press X to reel makes it way more fun. Even the legendary fish I managed to find after a while.
I've played this game for hundreds of hours now and reach year 8 and almost completed everything on my first play through. Since I got my steam deck, the playing experience has only gotten better. I was going to wait until I reached perfection until I wrote this review, but I'm not sure I want to grind out the last couple of achievements required to hit 100%, so I've decided to write it now.
If I had any criticism, it would be limited to one thing and that is this game only saves when you sleep at night, so I feel compelled to complete the day in order to save. Often I start the next day and then realise I was going to stop but now I have to choose between turning off and restarting the day from 6am, or finishing "one more day". This isn't really a problem, it's just something I have to remember, as other games have saves when you close the game, or manual saves.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/413150/Stardew_Valley/
