Reading The Game: Stardew Valley
Our occasional series on storytelling in video games travels to Pelican Town to explore the bucolic pleasures of Stardew Valley, a farming simulator inspired by the classic 1990s Harvest Moon games.
For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective.
It was my daughter Parker who picked up Stardew Valley first. She's 13, smart, beautiful, furious, funny, clumsy as a newborn giraffe. She loves videogames the way I love videogames, but loves none of the videogames I love — not the shooty ones or the dark ones or the violent ones.
Stardew Valley is something different. The game is essentially a farming simulator — you grow crops and sell them, tend
