izigame.me

After an unexpected 55 hours of playing this game, I've concluded that this game isn't for me. I wish Steam had a "mixed" option for reviews, but here we are.
There's a lot to love about this game. It's a calming experience that lets you relax as you slowly progress through the games' systems. Many parts of the game are slow and deliberately tedious in a way that really makes you feel like you've truly earned what you've gotten. It's pretty satisfying.
The game also continually opens up in a lot of unexpected ways. New features, new areas, a lot of new content is never shown to you until it's unlocked. Once the game starts feeling a little stale, you'll suddenly unlock a new item that'll greatly speed up your farm, or maybe an entirely new NPC will show up permanently. If I were to return to playing this game, it'd be for this reason. I definitely haven't seen everything the game has to offer.
My problems with this game lies in my motivation for playing it. Stardew can be satisfying as you progress, but by no means do I find the gameplay enjoyable. The experience of actually farming, raising animals, mining and exploring caves, combat, fishing, it's all very monotonous. This doesn't have the same genuinely enjoyable gameplay loop that other games share, and that could have been okay, as long as there was some other reason to keep playing besides gameplay.
The characters of Stardew is what I find most disappointing; there's very little meaningful social interactions between the player and the characters, besides scripted events. You can talk to characters exactly once per day, where they'll often be repeating the same routines and repeating the same dialogue. To further your relationship with them, you just give them gifts until they reach scripted social sequences that, frankly speaking, don't feel very authentic to me at all. You never really talk with these NPCs besides scripted sequences and events, everything else is just repeated dialogue. It's hard for me to believe that my character is supposed to have a relationship with another character when most of it consists of me one-sidedly handing gifts and then hanging out sometimes, and only once. These characters never felt realistic to me and it's what killed my interest in playing, I could forgive monotonous gameplay if the characters, interactions, and general sense of community felt real.