janusz_gg reviewed Stardew Valley

This game is sold as relaxing and I have never found it relaxing for a single minute, and I've come to think that's a design fact rather than a me problem.

There is a clock. It runs constantly. Everything you do costs time, days end whether you're finished or not, and seasons expire with crops in the ground. That is a pressure system — a gentle one, but a real one — and the entire cosy-game framing around this title papers over it. I'd get to 6pm with three things left undone and feel the same low-grade anxiety I get from a work backlog.

The writing is lovely, the art is charming, and the systems are elegantly interlocked. None of that is in question.

A B because a game that gives me a to-do list and a timer is not the thing the culture around it says it is, and I think a lot of people who bounce off this game bounce off for exactly this reason and assume they're wrong.