Stardew Valley

GassyHaggis

I know I tend to post about racing more often than not but figured I’d show something my daughter and I have been working on. We play a lot of Switch games together and have done since she was wee. She’s now six and showed more interest in things other than Mario Kart and Mario Party. So we bounced around with Animal Crossing for a bit and tried other games but nothing really clicked.

Last November she pointed at Stardew Valley and asked what that was. So we promptly loaded up a farm (after spending way too long designing her character I might add) and we were met with this…

Welcome to Unicorn Fields Farm.

After talking her through the controls we started making a wee clearing. She wanted to work on her own seeds separately so we independently worked a wee space for a field and we went through a few days pottering about. She was hooked. Fast forward a few seasons and we get to this…

We have animals at this stage with chickens, cows, sheep, a few pigs. A decent field for growing crops and we have a steady supply of money coming in. But she is scared of the mines and refuses to go to them so I tend to do those whilst she looks after the crops and talks to all the folk in the nearby town.

Zip forward to the weekend there just before we headed into winter in our fourth year and you can see where we were at.

We have a restaurant she decided to make at the top left (purely decorative unless she forces my character to sit at one of the tables after making a reservation) , the greenhouse has been rebuilt and is producing ancient fruit which immediately goes into kegs in the shed beside the greenhouse for pure profit. We still care for the animals, the community centre is complete, we are venturing into pond life with a few of the warp totems unlocked.

Her aim now is to decorate the interior of each of our houses (although she has spoke about moving her house to the bottom right and making that her own area) whereas I’m talking about going into pig farming for maximum profit from truffles and truffle oil.

We have spent 120 hours on this farm and all of that has been together. I’ve absolutely loved every minute of it and yes that has been over six months but we’ve been taking our time and it’s been a blast (despite there not being any tractors).

Stardew Valley is our game and we love it.

Gordon

That’s awesome 🙂

Gordon

My eldest (also 6) has enjoyed watching me play the occasional game here and there before now but any time she tries to play herself, she struggles with the controls, gets frustrated and gives up. She was really excited to try Minecraft after talking about it with her friends at school, but she just couldn’t manage the controls - going from not really having played many games to needing to learn first person camera/dual analog sticks and a fairly complex UI all at once was never going to happen.

Last week I showed her Mario Kart 8 and she was instantly smitten. It has a couple of really nice control assist options for kids - one keeps the throttle pressed down for you, and the other helps with steering. So now she can play a full MK championship on her own and she’s absolutely loving it. We’ve also been playing a bit of the new Kirby game, which has been very popular too.

I’ve always been mindful not to “force” her into gaming - obviously I’d love to share my favourite hobby with her, but only if she’s drawn to it herself, not because I want her to. So who knows what’ll happen, but for the time being, we’re having a blast with Mario Kart and I couldn’t be happier. It was my birthday the other day, and she made me a card - she drew a picture of Toad on it and wrote “Mario Kart!” instead of “Happy Birthday” 🤣

GassyHaggis

Gordon That’s brilliant. Oh we are still a Mario Kart family aswell but Stardew is just for her and me. 😁 I had similar issues control wise with her on several games but Animal Crossing seemed to be the one where she understood the controls and with the pace of that game it was perfect to learn… but she very rarely asked to play it.

It was always Mario Kart she used to ask for because of the ease of accessibility but with Stardew Valley she just starts chatting about it randomly or asks if we can go on for a bit. Having said that we have slowly been turning off assists on Mario Kart and upping the kart speed at each success.

She ploughed through the Kirkby demo and with her birthday next month I’m considering getting her that.

But Stardew has just been hitting the buttons for both of us. The right amount of crafting, collection, decorating, quests. If you ever do try it, remember you can change the interface scale and the actual screen aswell otherwise it is a bit too much of a pixel game for my liking. One of the few games where split screen doesn’t really restrict anything.

Gordon

GassyHaggis Kirby has a pretty good co-op mode where the second player plays as a Waddle Dee (yes, I now know the names of the characters in Kirby) and can do most of the same stuff as Kirby minus the inhaling part. You can turn co-op on or off at any time I think, it’s pretty handy.

I’ve been meaning to try Animal Crossing with Meg. One of the things she really liked about Minecraft was the idea of a bit of land that was “hers” to arrange how she wanted. She also loves choosing how characters look and what they wear (much like your daughter it seems - she can spend 10 minutes agonising over the character select screen in MK8) and the controls and general pace of the game are fairly forgiving so it seems like it would be a good fit for her. Will give it a go soon.

GassyHaggis

Gordon Definitely worth a shot. A lot of reading at the beginning (of Animal Crossing) to get going and whilst Grace is fine with reading she ended up being lazy and asking me to read it all or she just clicked through everything.

She’s got her eye on the Ooblets that was shown on the Indie video Nintendo put out. Looks mental.