"Stardew Valley, but with a murderer" isn’t exactly something we’d expected to show up as a potential game, but it is one heck of an elevator pitch. Grave Seasons is a farming simulator in the vein of Stardew Valley and the Harvest Moon games — but with a big twist. Every time you start a new game, one of the villagers is assigned to be a serial killer, and you have to figure out who it is before they end up killing everyone in the village.
The game is being developed by indie studio Perfect Garbage, and has recently exploded in speculation thanks to the attention of cozy game enthusiasts on TikTok. Recent screenshots from development shows a cute pixel art-style, along with familiar icons for tools, money, and the time and date in the season. The darker tone is evident in the journal, where alongside the usual heart system for villager relationships, there’s a strike through the mayor’s name, with "accident?" scrawled above.
The central ethos of the game was succinctly summed up by studio director Son M on Twitter in 2021:
"I want to make a farming simulator much akin to Stardew Valley but with a larger town, and each time you load a new game, it randomly selects one of them to be a serial killer. Farm, fish, fight for your life, raise cattle, build a home, romance, stop murders, fish some more."
It’s a fun twist on a known formula. Everything else fans will know and love from other cutesy farming games is here, including the ability to romance individual villagers and form friendships, all while getting a farm off the ground — only now you have the added worry that those friends or potential beau could end up being offed by the hidden serial killer. Or, even more worrying, you could end up married to said serial killer. Wouldn’t that be a waste of gifted quartz.
There’s no release date for Grave Seasons yet, as Perfect Garbage is currently putting the finishing touches on a cyberpunk narrative adventure called Love Shore, but we expect to hear a lot more about Grave Seasons soon.
