First this review is coming from someone who has well over 1,000 hours on Stardew Valley across PC and Switch. I love the genre of cozy farming games, and find the optimization loop of farming really satisfying.
Fields of Mistria is a damn good farming game. If you've been looking for something that will fill the Stardew Valley-shaped hole in your gaming life, this might finally be the game that does it. This is honestly possibly the best heir apparent since Stardew defined the genre.
The basics of the game are carried directly from Stardew. You're a new face in a small town starting a farm. You help build up the town, meet and build relationships with the townspeople, explore a dungeon for resources, craft items for your farm and slowly improve the town around you. It's a very satisfying core loop.
This game *clearly* draws heavily from Stardew Valley, as many modern cozy farming games do. But it does it in a way that feels like it's taking what really worked with Stardew and smoothing out some of the rough edges it had. How you felt about those rough edges will probably define how you react to Fields of Mistria.
My impression is Fields of Mistria is trying to take the bones of Stardew and build a game that is a bit more accessible for the people who want the cozy farming and relationships but would like to tone down the "obsessively planning your farm out for days using a spreadsheet". It also feels a bit more polished and professional (as a game made by a studio instead of one guy is always going to).
In the process I do think it loses some of the things that made Stardew so addictive in the endgame, but it's not necessarily bad that this game is less likely to inspire you drop hundreds and hundreds of hours into it. But it also loses some of the unique voice and charm that Stardew had since Concerned Ape had total creative control. It can feel a bit like Fields of Mistria is Stardew Valley but made by a company listening to focus groups and a bit more afraid to take creative risks.
WHERE I THINK IT ACTUALLY BEATS STARDEW VALLEY
There are a few places that Fields actually steps up from Stardew. The perks system is great and really gives you a chance to make some meaningful choices fairly early in specializing. By the end of the story you'll have enough XP to take every single perk, which is nice, but you spend a lot of time early deciding if you want to focus on crafting, farming, combat, etc.
The story in Fields of Mistria is quite good and definitely more fleshed out than Stardew. Stardew really lacked a cohesive narrative, and this game tries much harder to provide one. The story is pretty good, and interesting enough to keep you engaged, though a little safe and leaning heavily into cozy fantasy genre tropes. The big advantage is it gives you a lot more direction. I know some people who were put off by the very open-ended way that Stardew starts in that they "didn't know what they were supposed to do." This game gives you clear objectives that keep you moving in the story, and keep you improving the complexity of your farm and how you grow and process your crops. That's pretty nice for people just getting into the genre.
I also really like the art direction overall. I was actually put off a long time from the game by the anime-style character portraits, but they definitely grew on me once I tried the game. The villagers in FoM have really nice portraits that bring them to life and I love how they change their look from season to season. There's also much better representation of different races, sexualities and body types in FoM, which I personally appreciate.
There are some really nice quality of life changes in FoM that I think arguably improve on some of Stardew's systems. You get your horse a lot earlier, which makes moving around feel like less of a chore. There aren't multiple levels of quality for each item to clutter up your chests and inventory. This is one of the places that I think they made a choice between the Stardew system, which was deeper, and a more casual-friendly system. There's more depth to the ranching system, which makes it more engaging. Ranching is also much closer to on par with farming in profits. The UI is cleaner and more intuitive.
PLACES I THINK IT FAILS TO LIVE UP TO STARDEW
One of the things that made Stardew such a memorable game is the storylines of the characters. The townspeople in Stardew had rough edges that you got to explore and that made it feel more real. Mayor Lewis' clandestine relationship, Shane and Pam's substance addiction, Penny's low self-esteem, all of them are memorable moments because they made Pelican Town feel like an authentic small town with both charm and people with issues. FoM, like most Stardew successors, abandons those rough edges and I think to its detriment. Everyone is nice. Everyone gets along. No one seems to be struggling. It's very cozy, but feels a bit saccharine at times. It feels very *safe* and uncontroversial.
There are also some odd choices about romancable characters. Obviously 1.0 isn't out yet, but the release announcement didn't mention expanding the romancable pool. Several characters who are young and single are not romancable, and I'm sure they'd be popular (Olric and Valen being to me the two most glaring omissions, particularly because Valen has such an interesting androgynous design, and Olric is clearly meant to match some well established Romance genres). The pool of adult characters is also considerably smaller in Fields of Mistria. While you can argue that there is more content per character, I still think the very small core village cast in FoM limits it significantly. If they added more ability to build deeper relationships with some of the Saturday Market stall owners, who have great personalities and character designs, that would be great, but as of now the village feels deep but too small for me.
WHERE YOUR MILAGE MAY VARY
There are some things that are maybe improvements or maybe misses more depending on what you liked about Stardew. If you really loved optimizing your farm, getting down to counting tiles on the map and finding the perfect placement for buildings to maximize yields, you're not going to get that in this game. The farming is much more relaxed. Heck, you barely have sprinklers (there's only one kind and it requires an input that is much more limited, making hand-watering at least some of your crops really required even up to the end of the game). And processing crops into secondary products (mayo, cheese, cloth, etc.) actually requires your character to spend in-game time, so you have to make tradeoffs, and makes optimizing your farm harder, in the sense that spending time on x takes time away from y in a way that Stardew didn't really ask of you. Stardew optimization was mostly about design. FoM optimization is more about accepting trade-offs. I can spend time turning my eggs into Mayo, *or* I can put in another garden bed that requires hand-watering, but I don't have time in the day to do both, and I can't plan that problem away.
SUMMARY
The short version is this - Fields of Mistria is a worthy entry into the genre that Stardew created. It's better than any of the other attempted successors I've tried (which includes Coral Island, Dinkum, My Time in Portia, Fae Farm, and probably some more that I've forgotten). This game isn't "the next Stardew", but more another attempt to live up to Stardew. Unlike most games, which just fail to live up to the insane standard that Stardew set, this one I feel surpasses Stardew in some key areas. However, I think in the end it feels like the decisions tended in the direction of a bit too safe more often than not, and simplifying systems in a way that increases the breadth of it's appeal, while sacrificing some depth of end-game. But overall a very, very good game. Fields of Mistria it's "only" a 9.5/10 game trying to live up to the standard set by a game that's somehow 12/10.
