A man, disenchanted by the rigors of city living, leaves his old life behind to run a farm and rediscover a sense of purpose. That's the setup for Stardew Valley and just about every Harvest Moon game. But for Samuel, that premise isn't just a fiction. It's his real life.

Living on a farm had been one of Samuel's dreams since he was a child, but life has a way of sweeping aside our big ideas. Then last year, Samuel started playing Stardew Valley. Now, at 33 years old, Samuel has given up his city apartment in Illinois that he's lived in for years and bought a small farm out in the country. 

"I've got a friend over right now and about two weeks ago and we were outside having a beer and he said, 'You are living in a Harvest Moon game. You know that, right?'" Samuel tells me over the phone while laughing. "The similarities, believe me, they don't escape me. A lot of people are telling me that I'm taking cosplay to the extreme."

But a dirty pair of overalls isn't just a costume Samuel wears for a bit when he feels like it. With 2.5 acres of land, a barn, shed, two dogs, and a real fixer-upper of a house, Samuel's got more responsibilities than he's had in a lifetime. And, despite having "a few more grey hairs" because of it, he tells me he would never go back.

"It's everything I wanted it to be." 

Four walls

Multiple times a night, trains would run by Samuel's window. It wasn't a comforting sound, just another way that the restlessness of the city invaded his life. For someone who grew up running through the vineyards of his aunt's farm, the chaos of the city just wasn't where Samuel felt he belonged. He might not have worked in a soulless Joja corporate office like in Stardew Valley's introduction, but his life was just as unsatisfying. And his "cramped" apartment wasn't helping. 

"I love my job, don't get me wrong, but when you come home and all you have is four walls to stare at, it turns into tedium after a while," Samuel admits. "I can go outside, but as soon as I step out the door I'm in the middle of the city. I step out and its concrete, there's nothing I can do about it. What's there to do? You can go to the bar I guess. I can become an alcoholic or I can stand outside and stare at the ground."

I know that it's mostly a joke when he says this, but I also sense a kind of desperate truth to it.

Unsurprisingly, Samuel passed the time by playing videogames. As we talk about them, he makes a few lighthearted jabs at Mass Effect: Andromeda, mentions how much he loved Dust: An Elysian Tale, and confesses that he's been playing EVE Online for almost eight years. But Stardew Valley was different. "It had that little piece of charm, a piece of magic that people grab onto and you just don't find that everywhere," Samuel says. "It had so much heart and so much soul."

While he's always enjoyed the older Harvest Moon games, Stardew Valley took hold of him in a different way. As 2016 ticked by, he clocked over 120 hours cultivating his plot of virtual country heaven. For someone who grew up in the country, Stardew Valley had a powerful grasp on the beautiful nuances of that kind of life.

When the isolating freeze of a midwestern December began to creep into his apartment, so too did Samuel's restlessness. He needed to get out of the city. "I felt disillusioned with that kind of lifestyle," he says somberly. "I wanted to get my hands dirty and I wanted to go out and tear the soil up and see what I could grow. I think there's a disillusionment from modern society. People get tired of always looking down at their phones and eventually one day you look up and say, what am I doing with my life?"

"I realized I needed to grab my dream and run with it and take all the chances I can." 

After New Year's, Samuel says he was sitting with some coworkers talking about their resolutions when he thought, to hell with it, and confessed his: "I'm going to buy a farm. I'm going to have chickens and two turkeys and I'm going to name them Christmas and Thanksgiving and I'm going to do this thing I've always wanted to do."

"Everybody said I was nuts," he laughs.

A new beginning 

Samuel bought the first farm he visited. "It's ideal for me," he says. "It's 20 minutes from my job and 20 minutes from my parents' house, but slap in the middle of nowhere."

True to the premise of Stardew Valley, the 2.5-acre property had been neglected for years. Samuel says that, structurally, everything was in great shape, but there was a lot of preliminary work that would need to be done—trees to cut, weeds to pull, and stones to break up. 

That's not to mention the work that needs to be done on the house. "It needs updating," Samuel laughs. "The green shag carpet is a bit much." He tells me that when pulling some of it up, he found hardwood floors underneath and immediately got excited. Then he pulled up more of the carpet and realized that what he thought was hardwood flooring was actually just half of the front porch. When the previous owners wanted to expand the inside, they simply cannibalized half of the porch.

Despite all the maintenance the property needs, that hasn't stopped Samuel from getting started on the actual farming. The field beyond his house is already tilled and planted. "I've got onions, okra, cucumber and I have a row of cabbages out there even though it's a little early for cabbages right now," Samuel says excitedly. "I plan on throwing in some lettuce and pole beans too. I also plan to grow a little bit of tobacco out in the field."

I ask him why he wants tobacco. "I've always wanted to try it because my grandpa used to grow tobacco," he says. "I remember being a little kid and you'd see these big, huge tobacco plants hanging up in this old beat up green shed he had. I don't know, I just thought it'd be fun to do."

That's just the beginning, though. After buying the property in January, Samuel's crops are already starting to resemble Stardew's. A friend gifted him two apple trees which he's already planted. There's a row of grape vines that he hopes to turn into sugar-free jam. "I also want to make wine and I want to get some hops and brew beer. I just want to be one of those crafty kinds of dudes. It sounds like fun and hey, if you can get drunk in the process, even better."

And then there's livestock. Samuel tells me that he plans to have around 15 chickens, including his two turkeys named Christmas and Thanksgiving. Though some people have tried to talk him out of it because of the effort, he's considering getting a pig or maybe a goat. "I know everyone says they're cute and all, but boy, they're yummy," he chuckles. A neighbor also gave him two Saint Bernard puppies that he's named Donny and Gordon. On top of all that, he plans to keep four hives of Carolina Honeybees. Like tobacco, beekeeping is another way Samuel can emulate his great grandfather. 

It's certainly an ambitious plan, but Samuel is confident he can do it. Though his knowledge of farming is limited, it runs in his blood. "My great grandfather was a farmer in the area where I grew up," he says. "He immigrated from Germany and everything I know about farming or beekeeping I learned from my mother because she learned it from him. That's a wealth of information that I can tap at any time."

But as much as Samuel likes to joke that he's living a real-life Stardew Valley, he isn't. Sure, he gave up his apartment and moved out to the country, but he's skeptical he'll ever be able to sustain himself on his own land. Come summer, he won't be able to plant a few hundred blueberry bushes and drop them in a bin for someone to pick up in exchange for a few thousand dollars like he could in Stardew Valley. A living wage doesn't come that easily.

On top of everything Samuel has to take care of on the farm, he's also working night shifts full-time to make ends meet. "When I took possession of [the land] I thought it was going to be three or four hours of work a day. When I get off work and its seven in the morning it's a good time to work, so I work until noon and call it a day. But I've realized it'll probably take a couple of years, honestly, to get it where it needs to be."

And even once the farm is back in good shape, fields full of crops and a pen full of animals, it's unlikely that Samuel will ever be able to make a serious living off just the land alone. Agriculture just isn't what it used to be—especially for such a small farm.

I ask him if he ever doubts his decision. "Every day," he says without pausing. "Every single day I definitely have moments of self-reflection and doubt where I think, oh boy. I can work for six hours and it may not look like I've accomplished anything at all. I'm beat up and broken and covered in dirt and dust and I'm just like, did I even accomplish anything?" 

Looking at it cynically, I can't help but worry if Samuel might've bitten off more than he could chew in pursuit of an idle fantasy. But then I ask him if, in spite of all the hard work, he's happier now than before. He pauses a moment and then tells me a story.

A few months back, Samuel finished up his night shift and drove out to the farm. The weather had worsened overnight and, upon arriving, he found a six-inch blanket of snow draped over everything. As he stepped out of his car and his boots crunched in the snow, he stood still and listened. He heard something he hadn't heard in the longest time: perfect silence. "I was just like, this is it. This is perfect. This is where I need to be, right here." 

A wonderful life 

Giving up life in the city to buy a house in the country was a gamble, but for Samuel it's paid off. "I was just outside drinking some coffee and everyone who drives by will give you a wave. In the city, everyone is so fixated on what they're doing they forget the community they live in. They don't know who their neighbors are. I lived in that apartment and I only met my neighbors who lived 20 feet away from me maybe twice, I couldn't even tell you their names. Now that I've moved here, I've got about 10 neighbors around me and I know every single one of them."

I wanted to know where he sees himself in a few years, and he begins to ramble excitedly about all of his plans for his new life. He even mentions having kids. He'll need to get married first, so I ask what his strategy is to woo the local bachelorettes. "I'm going to run up and hand them an egg and then leave," he laughs. "That's how you win the ladies over, right?"

Given how much his life is turning out to become Stardew Valley, nothing would surprise me. 

But really, Samuel isn't too concerned about the future. He's just enjoying each day as it comes. "I've had a very negative attitude for a very long time. But you can't carry it with you or you'll have more grey hairs than you plan on. You can't constantly be negative, you can't constantly be worrying about everything going wrong in the world when what you really need to worry about is your two acres of land. The whole world is going to take care of itself, but at the end of the day you got to get outside and feed the chickens." 

It's only been a few months, though, and it's quite possible the charms of country living might one day wear off. It's something that Samuel has accepted as an inevitability. But for him, it's not about the romanticized fantasy of simple country living. It's about working to achieve the things that matter most.

"It's really easy to go out and plant the garden and put that seed in the ground, but it's really hard to weed and tend to it for months on end," he tells me. "I hope I'm up to the task. But when it's your dream, you have to take the bad with the good. You have to take those hard times with all those good times, that's where the real charm is. It's not in sitting back and having a glass of tea, it's sitting back and having a glass of tea after you've worked for 12 hours. That's when it counts." 

After months of murmurs within the farming role-player's forums, Stardew Valley now has localisation in six new languages. Update 1.2 also brings with it improvements to controller support as well as a host of bug fixes. 

Surplus to its default English option, players can now sow and socialise in German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian-Portuguese. 

Publisher Chucklefish bills this as the latest update's "biggest" new feature, however controller support has been improved across a couple of key areas—such as snapping between menu buttons as default, and accelerating faster in the event this function is disabled. 

On the bug fixes front, the following points have been resolved/adjusted: 

• Fixed lighting shader not covering the whole screen on Mac and Linux.
• Switching from 'Windowed Borderless' to 'Fullscreen' should now go straight to fullscreen instead of Windowed mode.
• Wallpapers and floors no longer have a tile placement indicator showing a random object.
• Increased stability of preference-saving code. This should fix infrequent crashes that require the player to delete startup_preferences.
• Fixed a crash that can happen when a pig tries to spawn a truffle but there’s no space for it.
• Fixed a couple of rare crashes that could have occurred at any time during the game.
• Fixed a typo of the word ‘pronounce’ in the marriage event.
• Fixed the player not getting the recipe for Cookies if they skip Evelyn’s event.
• Farming level now affects crop yield prior to level 10.

Chucklefish also notes that update 1.2 is for now exclusive to PC and that while Steam players should see the update installed immediately, GOG players may notice a slight delay in its implementation.

Update: A Chucklefish representative tells me that multiplayer won't ship with the Switch version of Stardew Valley that's releasing this summer. "PC users will still get to check out Stardew Valley multiplayer first," says Chucklefish's Molly Carroll, but that update won't be ready in time for summer, either. "It'll take some more time to get multiplayer where we want it to be!" 

Sorry to dash any hopes—it's my fault for misunderstanding the Nintendo announcement to mean that the Switch launch this summer would include multiplayer. The original, now out of date, story is below.

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Eric Barone released Stardew Valley as a singleplayer game, but only because multiplayer support wasn't finished yet. So we've known for a while that multiplayer is coming to Stardew Valley—officially, that is—and today it's been revealed that the big patch may be coming this summer. But we're not completely sure yet.

Nintendo announced today that the Switch will be the "first console" to have Stardew Valley multiplayer when it releases for the system this summer. As "first" is qualified with "console," the multiplayer update could come to PC at the same time, or even earlier—though nothing about it has been announced explicitly. 

The last we heard about multiplayer was on February 7, when Barone wrote: "All we can say is that we’re working on [multiplayer] and making progress. It’s not ready yet, though, and we can’t give you an idea of when it will be. We’ll let you know more as soon as we can. Sorry for making you wait!"

I've reached out to clarify whether or not PC multiplayer will come along at the same time as the Switch release, and will update this article if I hear back.

To mark the one-year anniversary of his life-in-the-countryside hit Stardew Valley, creator Eric Barone posted some "really old screenshots" of the game that he's kept lying around on his PC, and reflected on life before and after its release. "In some ways, it’s hard to believe that an entire year has already gone by since launch," he wrote. "Yet, at the same time, it’s been the longest year of my life." 

The reason, he explained, is that finally finishing and releasing Stardew Valley did not afford him the opportunity to slow down. If anything, it sounds like it was entirely the opposite. In the year since it came out, he has:

• Released many patches to fix bugs and tweak gameplay
• Done dozens of interviews
• Answered thousands of messages/emails
• Provided personal troubleshooting and technical support
• Made many Business/Merchandise deals
• Developed and released the 1.1 update
• Exhibited at PAX and met many fans
• Met Mr. Yasuhiro Wada, the creator of Harvest Moon
• Flew to the UK to visit Chucklefish and collect an industry award
• Built a decent computer and got a nice big desk (No more HP Pavilion propped on a Wii U box)
• Worked with Chucklefish to make the console ports and localizations happen

"Considering that I had spent the previous 4-5 years in my own little bubble, working alone, doing essentially the same thing every day… and now suddenly to be thrust into the limelight… it was quite the change!" Barone wrote. "I’m happy about it, of course. I mean… it is a weird feeling, at first, to have something that once seemed so distant, so impossible… some pipe-dream that you fantasized about in the dead of night… actually come true. It takes some getting used to, and that’s part of what this last year has been for me."

The screens he posted date from 2012, when Stardew Valley was still called Sprout Valley and set in a smaller and less well-rounded countryside locale. But the "bones" of the game, as he put it, "were pretty much there" even all those years ago. So what took so long to get it finished? "Polishing" is the short explanation, although Barone's definition of the term is a little different than mine.

"I ended up re-doing nearly all the art several times. I redid the vast majority of the soundtrack. I expanded the NPCs way beyond anything you’d see in the 2012 version. I made the map way bigger and more detailed. I added JojaMart and the Community Center. I added tons of items. I totally changed the crafting system and the mines," he wrote. "I drew every single NPC with 4 different expressions, scanned them in, colored them… and then scrapped all of it. Then I went through probably 6 or 7 iterations of pixel art portraits before landing on the final ones."

It's a ridiculous amount of work, especially for just one guy, but you can't argue with the results, and it's great that he's been able to build Stardew Valley into such a success. (And build himself a decent PC, too.) Feast your eyes on a few more early-days Stardew (Sprout) Valley screens below.

Steam sales soothsayer Sergey Galyonkin, otherwise known as the creator of Steam Spy, has released a report on sales of games on Steam in 2016. Alongside Valve's own official ranking of the best-selling PC games of 2016, Galyonkin's graphs and figures provide a more granular picture of how the estimated sales of specific games might compare to one another. It also reinforces something we already knew: 2016 was an insane year for strategy games.

Before I dig in, it's important to underline that Steam Spy uses sampling to generate its data. These figures are estimates based on that sampling, and are by nature extrapolations. One discrepancy up front, for example: Steam Spy puts Doom as the fifth highest-earner of 2016, and Rise of the Tomb Raider as sixth. But Steam's official revenue ranking has neither of these games in the top 12. I asked Galyonkin to clarify this:

It's also worth noting that sales of in-game items, like those of Dota 2, aren't included in these figures. With those well-salted caveats hopefully in your mind, onto the takeaways:

• $3.5 billion worth of games were purchased on or redeemed through Steam last year. That figure includes keys that were bought outside of Steam, in bundles or directly from developers' websites. Galoyonkin disclaims that "The margin of error on this particular number is quite high," and that his estimates varied between $3.3B to $3.6B.
• No Man's Sky was the most successful independent game of 2016 on Steam, earning an estimated $43 million. (This estimate does account for refunds.)
• Although Dota 2 and CS:GO likely earned more if we could account for their microtransactions, Steam Spy says Civ 6 earned more revenue than any other game, an estimated $79 million.
• In copies sold, CS:GO outperformed everyone by a massive margin: 6.7 million new owners, with Rocket League miles behind at 2.6 million. Some amount of this, surely, can be credited to the use of alt accounts by CS:GO players. The official CS:GO website says that Valve's FPS had 10.8 million active players in December.
• Stardew Valley probably earned about $24 million last year. Steam Spy thinks that it earned $9.2 million in March after it released on February 26. Stardew may have sold 1.5 million more copies than Mafia III. Not bad for a one-man project.
• Call of Duty is a notable omission from Steam Spy's top 25, both in copies sold and in revenue. "Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare performed way worse than Black Ops III," Galyonkin notes. Black Ops III does make some appearances in the best monthly sales of January, February, September, and November.
• Steam Spy thinks that CoD: Infinite Warfare sold about 245,000 copies in November, slightly less than Planet Coaster.
• "An average game on Steam got median sales of 6,640 copies in 2016 with $25,245 in revenue," says Steam Spy.
• 4726 games were added to Steam in 2016, according to Steam Spy.

Read the full report, which includes other notes on trends in independent games, right here. 

Stardew Valley captured the spirit of the PC for us this year. GOTY gongs are chosen by PC Gamer staff through voting and debate. We'll be posting an award a day leading to Christmas, along with personal picks from the PCG team. Keep up with all the awards so far here.   

Phil: A twee, saccharine farming sim RPG about community, magic, and getting a good return on investment for your organic parsnips. Stardew Valley is a compelling thing, following your new life in a remote community as you grow your farm, meet locals and take part in local events. If you've played a Harvest Moon game, this will all sound familiar. But Harvest Moon never came to the PC. Its absence created a demand in the market filled by Stardew Valley's sole developer, Eric Barone, who single-handedly did the design, coding, art and music. It's easy to praise Stardew Valley as a technical achievement, and as a heartwarming PC success story. It's also worth celebrating because it's an incredibly good game. Whether you're planting crops, tending to animals, or exploring the mines, it's easy to get lost in the compulsive loop of integrated systems and crafting. Before long, you're invested—in the farm, the town, or the individual people—and expanding your local business in an effort to complete the next major goal.

Tom M: There was a solid month of my 2016 consumed by thoughts of planting crops and wooing a redheaded bookworm named Penny. Neither are easy tasks, as Stardew Valley likes to take its time, giving me long days that somehow still feel far too short to get all my chores done. It doesn’t rush relationship building, completing tasks like the community center bundles can take a full calendar year, and raising enough money to make a respectable looking farm takes even longer. In a similar style to Skyrim or The Witcher, it puts you in the driver's seat of an immaculately detailed world with no wrong choices. The game isn’t without problems—tricky controls and a relatively light late game, for example—but what makes it so compelling is just how good it is at drawing me into that world. And in true PC fashion, it’s being updated for free with new content and fixes, mods are being made and shared, and a community is growing in a similar way to that of Terraria or the early days of Minecraft. Stardew Valley is an underdog success story, and a game I imagine I’ll be playing for years to come.

For more on Stardew Valley read our review, our guide to the endgame, and our roundup of the best Stardew Valley mods.