Grave Seasons preview: Stardew Valley meets Resident Evil

Grave Seasons takes the cosy farming sim vibes of Stardey Valley and injects blood-curdling horror into its rural bliss.

Farming simulators aren't often my cup of tea, mainly because they're so open-ended that it can be easy for your playthrough to fall off if you're not 100% committed.

Stardew Valley is a bit of an exception but even then I find it difficult to stick with my current farm for more than 10 hours or so, rookie numbers.

Grave Seasons feels different though. The demo I played at Summer Game Fest started out like any other game in the genre, with your character moving out to the country to escape their troubles, in this case, prison!

My day was spent like any other, foraging for materials, planting seeds, harvesting crops and all that good stuff.

Things took a turn for the worst though when I was informed by the locals of mysterious disappearances, and while tending to my crops I found a severed hand amongst my fruit and veg.

Then the plot went from a slow build of tension to all-out horror as I watched one of the locals get ripped apart by a werewolf…

The demo ended but I was eager to play more, even more so when one of the developers informed me that the threat of the playthrough selected at random when you start a file. Not only that, I was told in the full game you can save some of the NPCs, adding greater importance to speaking to them when you can and learning more about them.

Grave Seasons was good fun, and I'm eager to learn more about its dark world and my character's place in it.