GameTech: Farm game is a breath of fresh air

For most of us, the closest we’ll come to tending farm animals is our Twitter feed, writes Ronan Jennings

For most of us, an acre is a Sunday morning headache. For most of us, a bad crop is when profile pictures go wrong. And that is why Stardew Valley has been a runaway success.

Stardew Valley is a farming simulator, but not the serious kind. You won’t be fretting over milk quotas or soil quality here. There are no diseases or overheads to worry about. Instead, you control a little man as he walks about a cartoon patch of land, helping him plant seeds, build coops, erect stables, go fishing, and watch the days roll by. And as the days roll by, they turn into months, and the months into seasons, and your little farm becomes a bigger farm, which you can diligently tend to — or which you can happily ignore, if the workload becomes tiresome.