BEFORE DOWNVOTING ME, PLEASE READ: This is my opinion, you can disagree with it all you want, but it would be really nice to at least respect what I have to say just the same as I respect that people really enjoy this game

I played this game before I started Stardew Valley, I have never played either of them, the look and feel of Stardew did not really appeal to me. So I decided to try this game. Instantly love the anime style characters and graphics of the game, love the color palette, love the world design. It’s beautiful. So that was what really drew me in…

They made the game way too easy so it’s not even remotely challenging at all. There is so much unnecessary silly hand holding in this game. I wasn’t expecting something sweaty and hardcore but seriously, anytime you plant a crop and harvest it for the first time you get the recipe for it in the mail. Like what? We can’t even just go to a place and just browse for recipes normally, it’s just given to you automatically in the mail for no reason.

Lots of things in this game are like this, as well. No effort put into getting anything, everything’s just handed to you given to you or spoon-fed to you. This makes it very boring because you don’t get to just wander around and explore and find stuff at vendors or look online or elsewhere to try and figure out how to do something. Even certain major things like crafting or blacksmithing… You can just do it right out the gate with no training, and no need to wait any time at all for the blacksmith to craft it.

There are too many similarities to Stardew, making it feel copy pasted. Again I played this game first, but I knew that Stardew was out there before this game was. So after playing this game and pretty much doing everything that there was to do, I decided to try Stardew Valley since that game is mostly complete and finished, this game is early access and will change… I was shocked to find out that they pretty much copied huge aspects of Stardew and didn’t even try to do anything differently.

• The mine system and the elevators, they literally carbon copied Stardew Valley verbatim. You go into the mine and break rocks and then a ladder appears, then you unlock the mine level every five levels. They didn’t even try to do anything different just copied it.

• The museum. Wow like… They just copied it exactly wtf? There’s literally nothing different.

• Some characters are too similar to Stardew. Abigail, the purple-haired girl in Stardew is the most popular to romance. Who is the most popular one in this game? Juniper, another purple-haired lady. Celia, blonde lady, very similar to Haley. I could go on for about 5 minutes about this but I won’t. Just look, too many similarities

• Seasons. Why are they the exact same? They didn’t even try to do anything differently.

There’s virtually no passion at all put into Fields of Mistria

Concerned ape, developer of Stardew, has a whole beautiful backstory about how he came to develop one of the most popular indie games in the world. It wasn’t his first game that he developed, and it was extremely difficult, challenging, a very long-winded effort for him to develop the entire game, and get it to be state that it is in today. A true passion project and the more you hear about it and see the changes made to the game over time, the more you can understand how freaking passionate he was about the game… This is nowhere to be found in Fields of Mistria! There is no intricate story of how the game was a labor of love, or how hard they worked to bring the game to life. All you can find when looking at their website is that it’s developed by a huge team of people, and a huge amount of marketing hype, game streaming videos where they showcase the game. There’s nothing inspiring, or beautiful, or gripping about the development of the game. It’s just a generic indie game that looks really cool. To me, this was really disappointing. It just feels like there’s some mid-sized gaming company behind this, and that’s the end of it.

There’s virtually nothing to find or discover on your own

Due to the insane amount of hand holding and early access status, and the fact that they just basically copied all the main parts of Stardew Valley, there’s virtually nothing to find or discover on your own.

In Stardew, there are huge amount of things that I was able to discover on my own just wandering around or purely by chance, which made the game so much more exciting and enjoyable. For example, there was randomly this thing called Green rain, it’s raining green, no explanation for it but people in town are like scared of it and huddled up in the local tavern, and Moss grows all over trees and stuff like that. Pretty awesome. There’s also a spa that you are not introduced to You can just basically stumble onto it on your own and it restores all your energy.

Fields of Mistria has literally nothing right now that you can find or stumble onto by chance. Even stuff like a destroyed bridge, you get a quest and hand holding, you don’t even repair it yourself.

Community team is non-existent

I barely hear of any updates from the community team. All I have seen over the past several months are marketing hype videos, streaming, updates but not on a platform most people use. People don’t use x or Twitter or whatever the hell it is. So it’s hard to follow the game’s updates. They have an entire team of people listen on the website, but can’t be bothered to actually connect with the community and actively work with them like Concerned Ape who makes Stardew does. I asked if it were possible for them to post updates on a platform that people actually use. Reddit? Meta’s threads? Facebook? I mean they have a discord but it’s a community discord, and they have nothing to do with it, they hardly ever react or reach out to anyone there. There’s just no community presents at all other than trying to grab people’s attention and get them to try the game. That to me sounds like a cash grab. Like, they don’t really care about the people who have purchased it and are holding on for future updates, they just want to get as many people to get it as possible

Summary

I give Fields of Mistria a 4/10. It’s lovely looking, but why would I want to play a low effort copy and paste of another game that came first?

TLDR:

• Graphics: Attractive anime-style visuals and color palette

• Lacks any challenge, overly simplistic. Constant handholding removes any sense of choice.

• Copy-Pasted Stardew Mechanics: Mining, museum, seasons, and characters feel blatantly lifted from Stardew Valley with almost no originality.

• Passionless Development: Feels like a corporate indie product with no genuine vision or passion behind it.

• Weak Community Engagement: Dev team’s communication is poor and scattered across low-traffic platforms, hinting at more interest in marketing than in actual player connection.

• Limited Discovery: Exploration is nonexistent; everything is handed to the player, stifling any real sense of adventure.

• Overall: Fields of Mistria is a 4/10. visually decent but ultimately a hollow, uninspired Stardew Valley clone. Nothing to justify its cost