Grave Seasons is the terrifying Stardew Valley clones you’ve been waiting for

“I think this feeling of unease has always been lurking under the genre’s surface as part of the natural tension of farming,” Son, one of the studio’s cofounders and writers, told Polygon over a Zoom call. “Y’know, animals would die in the older Harvest Moon games, and I remember when the music would cut at night, and it’s ambiance and you alone in the world, it felt pretty eerie and isolated.”

The cozy genre’s rapid growth over the last few years also inspired the desire to dig into its darker side, as it has other studios, too. “Cozy” has very specific terms and requirements, Son said, which naturally made them want to push at those boundaries and test their limits to see what kind of storytelling opportunities present themselves just by reshaping expectations and flipping familiar devices on their heads.

Chief among those expectations is the idea that the protagonist in a farming sim is inevitably a nice, innocent person who rolls into town with no secrets to hide. That very much isn’t you in Grave Seasons. You’re a recently escaped convict, and the isolation of a remote farm is a necessity, not a balm for city living. You can still decide how you want to live and what kind of role you’ll play in the community, but Nahil hopes it gives people a chance for greater introspection and roleplaying than you usually see in farm-sims.

“We ask you to participate in the community, to come off of your farm on the mountain and engage with the people around you, learn more about them, and kind of interrogate that sense of isolation,” Nahil said. “Interrogate why you want to be successful at farming in this management sim. Okay, you’re farming, you’re accomplishing all these goals, but who are you doing it for? Is it for your own needs and your own purposes, or do you have something else in mind? Is there a larger conflict that you want to engage with?”

There is a larger conflict in Grave Seasons, though you’re free to interact with it as you see fit. Innocent people are dying in horrible ways, and unspeakable horrors haunt the town after dark. Everyone has something to hide, and unlike in some other, similar games, they aren’t eager to give up their secrets just because you gave them 27 strawberries. If you want to pry into someone’s private life, you have to work for the knowledge. When that easy access is gone, it changes your perception of other characters — and how the early game plays out. Even when you work to gain someone’s trust, they’ll still keep parts of themselves from you. Then again, you’re a criminal, so a bit of breaking and entering to find someone’s hidden secrets isn’t that big of an ask.

Image: Perfect Garbage/Blumhouse Games

The spate of murders and their perpetrator aren’t the only secrets in this town, though. Son and Nahil were keen to do some thematic mirroring, where the killer’s issues, the problems everyone else faces, and the protagonist’s story all mesh together to some degree depending on your choices.

Every story features one killer, and that killer is a supernatural creature. But that’s not why they’re the killer. Major characters have alternate monster identities, which means even if they aren’t the killer, they’re still some kind of otherworldly creature beneath their ordinary surface. The idea Perfect Garbage is going for is that these alter egos reflect the character’s inner turmoil and impact the kind of person the protagonist ends up being. Creature horror is something that Nahil and Son have always enjoyed in general, but it also lets them examine deeper topics from a safe distance — not too on-point that it feels preachy and insincere, but not so metaphorical people miss the message.

“Leaning into the supernatural and creature horror lets us explore a lot of personhood theming too, what it means to be a person and how changeable morality is,” Son said. “We incorporated some of the pop-culture fears at the time when [a specific] creature was created, and we’re trying to explore what those fears mean for us now and for the character.”

“There’s something inherently sympathetic about exploring these characters as creatures, too. They are dealing with whatever they’re dealing with in both forms, and you have to figure out how you approach them when they’re in one position versus the other. It lets us explore a lot of these motifs in a more fluid way. If we just had someone like Hannibal Lecter, it wouldn’t work. You’re gonna have a very specific tone with that kind of character.”

Image: Perfect Garbage/Blumhouse Games

The team aims to underscore how personal trauma and unsettled ghosts (not literal) of the past spill over into community life, so while your choices will have drastic consequences, everyone else’s will, too. No one’s course is immovable. Even a monster has the potential to change their fate. The Perfect Garbage writers adopted a mindset similar to Scarlet Hollow‘s writers at Black Tabby, where they don’t want to punish your choices or give you clear answers. People may die or have their lives altered in unexpected ways, but whether it’s right or wrong — well, that’s for you to decide. It means putting in a lot of extra work so every branching choice leads to something worthwhile, and Nahil said he’s proud of how robust the different paths are.

If there’s one thing Son and Nahil want people to take away from playing Grave Seasons, though, it’s a different idea of what it means to push yourself and be there for someone else.

“Connecting takes effort,” Son said. “You can let yourself kind of stay in one spot and be stagnant and work on things that you want to work on, and we’re not saying it’s inherently positive or negative. But if you want to kind of build these meaningful relationships with the people in town and make a difference, you have to come down the mountain and talk to them, you have to work with them, you have to go attend events with them, you have to discover things about them, and see everything you’d miss if you just let yourself become isolated.”

Grave Seasons will be released Aug. 14 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.