Stardew Valley Reviews

Stardew Valley is ranked in the 99th percentile of games scored on OpenCritic.
Polygon
Top Critic
Unscored
Mar 30, 2024

It’s unclear whether there’ll be a massive 1.7 update in the future. Barone has been developing a different game, Haunted Chocolatier, since 2020, and while that’s currently on pause to get 1.6 bug-free and available across platforms, surely at some point Stardew Valley will be left to its own devices. But even if it doesn’t get any more major updates, its unshakeable core, long tail, and rooted community mean that it’s bound to stay at the center of the ecosystem that grew up around it for a long while to come.

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9.5 / 10.0
Oct 2, 2021

Stardew Valley is a rare experience that has a complex and effective reward system that keeps you saying to yourself “just one more day”. You can easily find yourself losing hours and hours that feel like minutes. You may develop an overwhelming urge to create spreadsheets and fill notebooks with observations, recipes, product values, and villagers’ favorite gifts. And it very well may be just what you didn’t know you needed.

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Essential
Apr 30, 2019

The world is charming, full of secrets, great storylines, and the gameplay systems all work very well together. The end result is a fantastic farm-life-sim that is incredibly hard to put down.

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4 / 5.0
Sep 30, 2018

Stardew Valley is an excellent game that let me quietly relax and enjoyably lose myself in for hours on end.

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IGN
Top Critic
9.5 / 10.0
Aug 7, 2018

Stardew Valley is a beautiful, fun game that, when all of its parts are pulled together, make for a wonderful countryside adventure.

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Aug 1, 2018

Stardew Valley is the best of its kind, surpassing the classic titles it shamelessly imitates to create one of the most delightful games of the past decade.

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Cubed3
Brandon (Michael) Howard
Top Critic
9 / 10
Dec 30, 2017

The portability of the Nintendo Switch makes this undoubtedly the best way to play Stardew Valley. Unless you are really keen on modding the game, the combination of easy portability and excellent controls makes this a staple in any well-rounded Switch library. It's still the same great farm simulator it was on PC - robust, full of secrets, and comes with an inescapable charm that will keep pulling you back in, season after season.

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9.5 / 10.0
Dec 10, 2017

Stardew Valley is an extremely relaxing and fun game. The variety of activities to perform keeps the player glued to the screen and turns this into one of the most addictive games of the last years. It deserves to be played by anyone with access to it.

Review in Portuguese | Read full review

PPE.pl
Top Critic
9.5 / 10.0
Oct 27, 2017

Stardew Valley is a fantastic title that every Harvest Moon fan should play. In nothing better in this genre currently you will not find, the game delights on every front. Take and play!

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XGN.nl
Top Critic
9 / 10.0
Oct 22, 2017

‎Even after a number of Stardew Valley years, the possibilities continue to feel fresh. No season is the same and you always have a new goal to achieve. And if you feel that you can say goodbye to your crops after fifty years, then it is definitely worth starting over as a winegrower with a different starting location. Because Stardew Valley is not boring!‎

Review in Dutch | Read full review

9 / 10
Oct 21, 2017

Stardew Valley is one of those games I could write about for pages and pages. Whatever the next day had in store for me whether it was harvesting, fishing, exploring the mines or simply running a quick errand for a friend, I couldn’t stop playing. The constant pull to earn money or better my relationship with the townspeople or just make my farm the best it could possibly be was a constant and something that continues to bring me back even now. Stardew Valley is a delightfully charming and deep experience and easily one of the Nintendo eShop’s best.

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9 / 10.0
Oct 16, 2017

Stardew Valley on the Switch is my third time buying it and the only one that actually clicked and got me addicted while proving to be a relaxing experience in the middle of the busy review season.

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Oct 14, 2017

Farming games, village life simulators, and similar games to Stardew Valley have always felt most at home on some sort of portable device.

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4.5 / 5.0
Oct 14, 2017

Stardew Valley brings a mix of farming and life simulation to the Switch and the platform is absolutely perfect for it.

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9 / 10.0
Oct 12, 2017

I've played over 30 hours of the game, and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon. More crops are always available to grow, more upgrades are ripe for boosting my farm, and more minerals are mine to mine. It's a game I can see myself coming back to time and time again for years, and that'll be easy to do with the portable nature of the Switch. It's a masterpiece, and a perfect game for Nintendo's newest console.

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Unscored
Oct 11, 2017

Time-consuming, life stealing, family-friendly fun. Stardew Valley is all of that and more and you would be mad if you didn’t give it a shot.

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Essential
Oct 10, 2017

A modern indie classic on PC finds in Nintendo's Switch the perfect platform.

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9.5 / 10.0
Oct 9, 2017

Smooth framerates, clear, crisp sound and every feature of its original at home or on the go. Stardew Valley on the Nintendo Switch emphasizes everything that makes the Switch so much fun, the best comparison to Stardew Valley on the Switch, would be Pean

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10 / 10.0
Oct 8, 2017

Stardew Valley is a game I came to adore on the PC and I’m thrilled that it is now on the Switch so it can be played anywhere. Within my family there’s so much love for this game that my oldest daughter specifically bought her Switch for this very reason. Though she has “finished” the game at least 3 times already, and is a walking encyclopedia of Stardew factoids, she still keeps playing. That’s the power of this game, and the sense of serenity that’s so easy to have when playing it, and it is why I’m giving it the first 10 I’ve ever awarded for this site. It truly is a modern classic, blending elements multiple games have touched on before and combining them in just the right ways to make something truly special.

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9 / 10
Oct 7, 2017

Stardew Valley offers its players a chance to live a second life – one where you can forget the troubles of the real world and get excited over finding a particularly rare carrot. It is a truly magical experience; games can often be enjoyable but they don't all manage to be as captivating as this. This is the sort of game that ideally requires a significant amount of time to be invested; the enjoyment doesn't necessarily come from the day-to-day actions you perform, but rather from the general growth of pride, satisfaction, and sense of security as the days go by. Fans of games such as Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing will be right at home here and, for those who aren't, there is a decent chance this game might just surprise you. For the asking price the risk couldn't be more worth it.

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