Stardew Valley Switch review | Village life has never been so accessible and satisfying

Farming games, village life simulators, and similar games to Stardew Valley have always felt most at home on some sort of portable device. I’ve lived in London forever: it’s a densely packed city that, while greener than you’d expect for somewhere often referred to as The Big Smoke, doesn’t lend itself towards the slower, often more structured life of farming.

Get up at 6:00 am every day, go outside to water the crops, sell those that have matured, go to the local store for some more seeds, plant those, and chat to your neighbours. For most days, that’s pretty much it. Sometimes I’ll go fishing down by the river, or mining and adventuring in the caves to the north, but that’s the typical routine.

In Stardew Valley, that’s what you do. It’s a village and farming simulator without too much more on top of that: through the seasons you can plant crops, raise livestock, take part in community events and live that calmer life. It foregoes realism in farming for a simplistic approach, an ideal of what farming life is like.

Your grandfather left you his farm, and one day, after getting sick of your office job and city lifestyle, you go to it in search of a different life. It’s messy and run down, but it’s your new home. Through the seasons, you’ll clear the mess, hoe the ground, plant seeds, and watch the crops grow.

It’s just wonderfully simple. There’s no complex machinery to drive around or farmhands to manage. The amount of crops you grow isn’t huge, it’s small scale farming for a large chunk of the game. Even when livestock become a factor, you won’t have many, maybe just a few chickens you let roam free. The reality of industrial-level farming doesn’t come in to play.

Because of that, it’s a wonderful little escape in moments where you might need it, which is why it coming to the Nintendo Switch is so perfect. It aligns incredibly well with the Switch’s strength: to be a console that you can play anywhere, that fits into your life, whether you’ve got hours to play games or just the commute into work.

Stardew Valley itself has no ‘right’ way to play. You’re able to marathon and start playing optimally, efficiently planting crops to get the most out of each seed, but you’re not pushed into it. Similarly, you’re welcome to interact with the villagers in Stardew Valley, but there’s no punishment for not doing it. You’re able to form relationships and have a choice of single people to marry, but you definitely don’t have to.

You’re even able to almost entirely forego farming if you want. Adventuring and mining can be a lucrative source of income, especially when you hit the game’s second series of caves. Fishing, too, can be your primary focus, if you so desire. You can, for the most part, ignore everything else and just treat it as a dating simulator, too.

There is a moment where the game grades you after some time, but apart from that, it just lets you do whatever you want. You’re able to play the village life that you want.

This definitely comes with drawbacks, primarily that the game offers little in the way of motivation or drive. There’s quests to complete but the real drive comes from what you want to do, and how you want to play. Stardew Valley hasn’t quite cracked the way to effectively push that, so if you start to lose interest, it becomes hard for the game to pull you back in.

It also makes it a challenge for you to be a jack of all trades farmer. Doing a little farming, a little fishing, a little adventuring doesn’t amount to much, especially as each in-game day is limited by your energy. Unless you’re buying food, or not selling your crops so that you can eat them yourself, each day is only as long as your energy. Watering crops drains a lot at the start of a day, making it quickly become costly to both be a farmer and an adventurer if you’re eating your produce or buying salads.

If you’ve got the income to sustain that, or you do just want to focus on one aspect of the game, then it works fine and the limited energy each day won’t bother you, but it often feels like a way for the game to prevent you from having days that it considers to be too productive.

When you are just going by, doing farm-y things and being a member of the community, it doesn’t come to mind though. It expects you to come along with the village life fantasy, but will fulfil it in a brilliant manner.

Stardew Valley is also on PC, PS4, and Xbox One, but it feels most at home on the Switch. Being able to play it whenever and wherever is exactly what the game needs, whether it’s at home, on the commute into work, or even in a cafe.

The farming and village life fantasy has never really been fulfilled in this way before, and the Switch makes it possible. It's a testament to how a game can use a platform to round everything together, becoming as accessible and fun as it could ever be.