Stardew Valley

Eric Barone built Stardew Valley almost entirely alone over four years, and it shows in how much it tries to be at once. You inherit a neglected farm in Pelican Town and decide what the game actually is: a crop-optimisation spreadsheet, a fishing game, a combat crawl down a hundred-floor mine, or a slow social sim about a small town's twenty-odd residents, each with their own schedule, birthday and multi-stage story. Nothing expires. Seasons rotate on a 28-day clock that quietly gates which crops, fish and festivals are available, so a year in becomes a planning exercise rather than a chore list. It arrived in 2016 as an unapologetic revival of Harvest Moon at a point when that series had drifted, and it outsold nearly everything it was imitating. Barone has kept shipping substantial free updates years past the point most solo developers would have moved on, adding late-game farm types, an overhauled endgame and full co-op. It remains the reference point every farming sim released since gets measured against.