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Comment by pixard | Hacker News Reader

This has the same kind of relaxing vibe as Stardew Valley. A very rare instant purchase for me once it is released.

For me personally these games stand out in a huge way in the sea of generic AAA micro-transaction "games". If anyone wants to drop some more SV-like game recommendations I'd love to hear them.

I am in continued awe ConcernedApe was able to accomplish all this largely on his own.

And beyond this that he continues that approach with his new game even though he could surely afford to just bring on as many developers/designers as he needed. He could even churn out a new game on a yearly basis and "milk" it all to maximize profit. The fact he is doing none of this speaks volumes (at least to me).

Eric if you somehow happen to stumble upon this comment know you've brought one couple many many happy hours together. We wish you all the best, and much love!

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I'm working on my own indie game that's inspired by Stardew Valley, so I've done a good bit of looking at similar cozy farming games. I also wrote an analysis of Stardew's game design that was well-received on Hacker News [1].

Animal Crossing is the granddaddy of cozy games, but the core loop didn't keep me engaged. More "arranging your house and island" than farming.

Cozy Grove is Animal Crossing with a far better narrative.

Graveyard Keeper, Littlewood, and My Time In Portia are closer to being "Stardew, but X". Your mileage may vary with each, but I enjoyed parts all of them.

Spiritfarer is my favorite of the lot. It plays differently enough with your hodgepodge boat-city of ghosts, but it feels the closest in spirit (rimshot) to Stardew. Bring a box of tissues.

My own game, Moondrop Mountain, is trying for a roguelike farming experience. It should be coming into Early Access early next year [2].

[1] https://www.pixelatedplaygrounds.com/sidequests/game-design-... [2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1417750/Moondrop_Mountain...

Don't forget that Stardew Valley itself is based on Harvest Moon.

Indeed. It's kind of surprising that this is the only comment mentioning Harvest Moon so far, since SV is so similar...

All the games mentioned in these comments are great, anyway. And I found some new ones to try now. :)

Could it be due to HN being more PC than console? I personally have not played Harvest Moon and am only vaguely familiar with the name. Stardew Valley however runs on Linux and has a large mod community (Stardew Valley Expanded for example) which has ensured a lot of replay in our house. It's the preferred family coop.

I think HN is pretty diverse. I, for instance, am a big fan of SDV. I've only ever played it on my android phone though.

I love the idea of a roguelike farming game. Often I feel bogged down in lategame, and regret early decisions I made. Faster mechanics and restarts would help a ton. Good luck!

Isn't Dwarf Fortress somewhat of a roguelike farming game? It definitely features farming (and crafting, and raising cattle and ... literally everything else) and has been called a "honorable roguelike" before.

Yeah, for sure. Dwarf Fortress randomizes a lot of environment and climate features but has standard crops. It looks like Moondrop Mountain also randomizes the properties of crops (similar to materials in Big Pharma).

It's interesting how shorter run-based gameplay impacts every aspect of play. It's like the difference between games with permadeath and games designed around permadeath. The former is a hardcore challenge, and the latter, I would argue, is the core of roguelikes.

While there's no "death" in my game (stayin' cozy), the idea that the player needs to go through multiple runs has been really fun to play around with :)

Heh.... my 1987 batch files to save, quit, copy, restart .sav files would like a word.

Moria FTW

save.bat and load.bat

Hades is the perfect balance of this. Short runs while still allowing some amount of progression.

> the latter, I would argue, is the core of roguelikes.

I might be showing my age here, but isn't permadeath the core of roguelikes? Like, isn't the point that you have to start fresh each play, and that's why games like nethack offered a bajillion character classes? Even the og rogue had permadeath.

Exactly! A game designed around permadeath will try to keep things fresh for the player, through randomized proc-gen level design or through different character classes. Or, to put it another way, imagine Super Mario World with a single life and no saves. It would count as permadeath, but it certainly wouldn't be a roguelike. Roguelikes are designed around permadeath at their core.

For a roguelike farming game, look into Atomicrops: https://store.steampowered.com/app/757320/Atomicrops/

Eastward just came out and has amazing SDV like graphics, I've not played it yet though.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/977880/Eastward/

PAX Online this past July had a panel called “ A Case for Cozy: Why We Need Wholesome Games” which may interest you if you haven’t seen it yet. They did give a list of some upcoming games in the genre.

I linked the PAX page below. I watched the stream after the fact in the PAX archive on twitch but I needed to scrub through the recording for the whole day and sub-channel to find it so I unfortunately don’t have a link directly to it.

[1] https://online.paxsite.com/content/sitebuilder/rna/pax/onlin...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN5GXrvUrVA

From one of the Youtube comments.

Game recommendations on the final slides:

Leanne: Parkitecht, Pokemon Go, Banished, Mineko's Night Market, Ooblets, To the Rescue

Kels: A Short Hike, Abzu, Animal Crossing, Mineko's Night Market, Skatebird, Ooblets

Josh: Yonder, Kind Words, Quench, Tunic, Welcome to Elk, Get In The Car, Loser!

Rougelike farming?! There is dungeon crawling in a tune based game with ASCII UI?!

Thanks for the recommendations. I and a few friends are big fans of SV so having more games with that feel will be great. Tried out AC recently and didn’t love the core loop either.

> instant purchase for me

Also, in comparison to AAA games from the biggest companies like EA (BF2042 Beta, hello) and Ubisoft, I KNOW that Eric will release a "ready to play" game, without massive bugs and missing content looming.

That's probably more due to one guy running the show in contrast to a slave driver / project lead with a team in 20 different countries who are barely aware of other team members existence?

Yeah, I didn't play a ton of SV, but I will buy this on day one for two reasons:

1. It will be wonderful to explore alongside a big culture of people without everyone being beta testers.

2. I like to support small, high quality games. As the new mantra goes "i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i'm not kidding" (https://twitter.com/jordan_mallory/status/127748375624544256...)

Not really like SV but all of Lucas Pope's games definitely stand out. Another individual who does pretty much all his own work. Paper's Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, both excellent and very unique.

Your mention of Return of the Obra Dinn reminded me of this article[1] which I found quite fascinating about dithering, the technique used for the game's art style. One of the neat things about these types of small indie games is that they can do unique things with (among other things) art style which bigger budget games that need a wider appeal can't afford to.

[1] https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/

If you're interested in that you'll probably like this post by Lucas Pope on how he handled dithering and camera movement - https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...

I never really got into "Papers, Please" but "Return of the Obra Dinn" is one of the best video games I have ever played.

The mechanics are amazing and make it a better detective game than most detective games. Plus, I really liked the story and setting.

Just in case OP hasn't played it, I genuinely cannot recommend it enough.

Completely agree. I wish I could forget everything about Obra Dinn so I can go back and play it again for the first time. I also recommend going into it blind, so that early on when the nature of what your character is dealing with is revealed, you won't have any idea it was coming.

Lucas Pope and Concerned Ape are supremely talented (they even compose the music for their games!). I'll buy anything they release at this point, sight unseen.

Some other games with similar vibes to Obra Dinn:

The recently released Echo Beach.. "As a clerk at the Ministry, your job is to hunt down the remaining musicians in their place of last refuge - The Musicnet."

https://tim-sheinman.itch.io/echo-beach

Hypnospace Outlaw "In Hypnospace Outlaw you play as a volunteer 'enforcer' who is tasked with bla bla bla... to make money bla bla. The cool thing is that there's a super robust fake OS and a really big fake internet with all kinds of neat things to find. OK?!? Ok!"

https://jay-tholen.itch.io/hypnospace-outlaw

Paradise Killer, too. I mainly like it for its heavy 80s vapourwave aesthetic and top-notch soundtrack.

Have you heard of Outer Wilds? It's a different setting, but you piece together a story by exploring. I'd really recommend it.

> you piece together a story by exploring. I'd really recommend it.

For anyone who likes this style of game, I can't recommend Myst and Riven enough.

Haven't gotten around to the later games in that series yet.

I should note I haven't played Obra Dinn, or Outer Wilds yet, so I may have misunderstood.

I’ve often made that comparison myself, though I hesitate sharing it in order to avoid triggering a possible knee-jerk response.

Outer Wilds is my favorite game of all time :) It is generally quite chill (though there are a few tense moments). I hear the DLC is a little scary/thrilling but I haven’t played it yet.

I just played Obra Dinn. For years I have been saying “Why aren’t there any games like Sierra’s Manhunter series?” Obra Dinn is the first game that ever reminded me of Manhunter. Also, it was fun and very well made.

You would likely enjoy Spiritfarer. As a bonus it has a built in local co op and can be played with two controllers from the same steam purchase. It tackles the theme of dealing with our own mortality and can be a bit hard to handle if you are depressed, but otherwise amazing experience.

Check out Graveyard Keeper, while a mildly more morbid vibe, the gameplay loop, graphics and general feel are quite similar.

Definitely worth a try, but I had to mod it a little bit to make the energy mechanics a bit more forgiving and to speed up the gameplay a bit - YMMV.

Graveyard Keeper is good on the story side, but it comes with much more grinding (performing repetitive tasks in the game) compared to Stardew Valley. Something to bear in mind for potential buyers.

I didn't bother with the extensions in the end after completing the main game (at this point you can often pick up the game with all of its extensions on sale).

Refreshingly original game nonetheless in terms of setting and 'job'.

I agree it's pretty grindy, but there was a free DLC that introduced "workers" (zombies) and that cut down on a lot of the grind.

There's a game called Atrio which is probably closer to Factorio than Stardew Valley but you might enjoy it.

I've heard good things about Animal Crossing too although I've never played it.

Kynseed is another one, by the people who developed Fable but its development is taking quite long.

Not exactly farming or SV-like, but "A Short Hike" (https://ashorthike.com/) is a laid-back, wholesome, "no-stress" kind of game I can highly recommend.

Give Noita a try, it's a fun indie roguelike with subtle powder toy mechanics. It's a proper hearty, arcade-like experience too. If I've got some spare time between projects, I seem to always find the time to fit a couple Noita runs in...

Something in a similar vein that I enjoy a lot is RimWorld. It's more of a simulation than an RPG, but it has some similar vibes. Especially if you tone down the combat portions of the game in the difficulty settings so you can focus more on base building and exploring rather than getting raided by Mad Max vagabonds every few days.

I don't know if it's been said already, but Starbound seems like it kind of fits into this world as well.

I remember there was some controversy around Starbound's Early Access status when it was first released, haven't heard of it since - I'm assuming that it has turned out fine based on your recommendation?

They have done a number of major updates and now it has enough of a story and gameplay mechanics to make it fun to finish the story. I think previously, you just were supposed to hunt upgrades without any story motivation.

Starbound is more like Terraria than Stardew Valley sadly.

Not a farming sim, but Celeste tight platforming paired with a very wholesome story made it stand out for me.

Aground is not as cozy, but has the same sort of pixel style and indie game feel. It's more like Terraria than anything. Like Stardew Valley, it has waaay more content and story than you expect at the start of the game.

> If anyone wants to drop some more SV-like game recommendations I'd love to hear them.

Not SV-like in terms of gameplay but if you're looking for gorgeous feel-good pixelart games you'll find all that in Eastward.

There's a new game coming out this week called Moonglow Bay which looks like it will have a similar vibe, but focused more on fishing. No idea if it will be good, but it looks interesting.

I still want a remake of 1997's 'Knights and Merchants'

Great game. AI went wonky when you reached ±100 serfs.

Sun Haven is a early access stardew valley like happening in a fantasy universe

Littlewood has similar vibes than SV

Animal Crossing has a pretty heavy overlap in vibe, although it is a decently-different game (e.g. not really about farming). Also, Moonlighter has some similar vibes.

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