I'm not a 'professional' game reviewer, so I can say that this review will filled with amazing facts or other things like that. Really, I just have a love of games, and wanted to talk about my love of this game: Stardew Valley. Now, I'd love to get into the plot of this game, but unfortunately I feel like a lot of the wonder of the game would get spoiled if I, well, spoiled the story. So I'll stay away from the story, stick to the game-play. To summarize the basic point of the game: you're a farmer, you've got a farm, you've got to fix it up and earn money in quite a few different ways, which range from selling your crops to mining for minerals to defeating different enemies.

This shows some different items from the game (look at how cute the little baby chick is!)

If you've ever played Harvest Moon, I've best heard the game described as a spiritual successor to it. With Stardew Valley, though, you can do even more things, and it's available on your computer. The price isn't bad at all, sitting at $14.99, considering you can get a lot of hours out of it (I've already seen some people who have played it for over a hundred hours). It's available on a couple of different places, but I got mine on Steam. The game was released on Feb. 26 and has already sold probably over 500,000 copies just from Steam, which is very impressive. What urged me to get the game is a video series of it by Ross and Barry of the Game Grumps. It looked cute and fun, so I thought, "hey, why not?"

There are quite a few gameplay aspects about the game I enjoy. Of course, the farming is fun. You can set your farm up in any way you want to, with crops and with barn animals. You can mine for stone and chop down trees for wood to help build upgrades, you can use your crops to cook delicious meals, and you go fishing in the ocean, rivers, or lakes. You can also interact with about 30 different NPCs, who you slowly become friends with over time. You can give them presents, have cutscenes with them, and once they like you enough you can date and then marry them. One thing that stands out is how gender doesn't matter when it comes to this, every character that's single, whether they're a boy or girls, will date your character, whether you're a boy or a girl.

My favorite character so far, Abigail, who you are able to marry.

Now it's less than a week after I've bought it and I've put way more hours than I probably should have into the game. It's strangely addictive, perhaps because there's just so much to do and you don't want to stop until you've done it. I had many times where I was convinced myself that I'd stop playing and get some work done, "after one more day (which is when the game saves)."

There's just a lot of possibilities with what you're given. You can given go explore the mines, where there are monsters waiting for you that can be fought off with the sword. I could go into a lot more into the game-play, but let's transfer over into the graphics of the game. It's an indie game with a pixel art style. I love the color of the game in general, it's got vibrant colors, in the winter. It makes it enjoyable to look at while you're playing it. I can't go too much into details because I'm no game designer, but from a casual player, it's just really nice.

Since it's a newly released game, it's got some bugs. However, none of the ones I've seen or experienced have made the game unplayable, and the developer is always hard at work making patches to help fix things. The one things that annoy me are the hit boxes in the game, because if I'm trying to talk to a person, I don't want to have to click multiple times to try to click on them.

Basically, I really enjoy this game, and think it's worth checking out. If you're interested, click here to go to the website.