I never played Harvest Moon growing up because my parents didn’t buy me any kind of console (I only got to play Kingdom Hearts because my best friend brought her PlayStation2 to my house during sleepovers haha!), but HM would have been exactly the kind of game I would have loved growing up, and indeed, love now. Don’t Starve is one of my favourite games ever for a reason, I love “grindy” games, I love maintaining a little base, mining, fishing (Sims 3 fishing, oh boy oh boy), and just “collecting”. So I could play infinite incarnations of that kind of game. From what I’ve heard during the LPs I watched before playing myself, it’s one man’s 4 year labour of love in homage to games like HM, while also improving on almost every aspect of the games that needed improving. Apparently the storyline is not as rich as HM, but the technical aspects, ie controls, farming, pickups/drops, interacting etc, are all much better and more intuitive. Also, my little sprite is female, and I’m able to romance female villagers, which is exactly what I wanted. The girl I mostly have my eyes on, a cutscene triggered for me to help her get past a level in a videogame in her room, which was just adorable. And it’s going to be mod supported on steam, so the story could be added to through that, endless possibilities really! But yeah, if you liked HM, I would imagine that you would like this, that it wouldn’t feel too much like a ripoff, and that it just comfortably sits into that genre of relaxing farming/fishing/mining/dating sim.
