The ‘Stardew Valley-like’ genre desperately needs a real name and I have the perfect answer

Cozy farm sim games have a problem: We still don’t have a good name for them. Sometimes I call them farm sims, but the ones that don’t actually have farms are life sims—not to be confused with Sims-like life sims—sometimes I mash them up into farmlife sims, and sometimes they’re just games like Stardew Valley when I give up entirely.

None of those things roll off the tongue. More importantly, none of them really capture the whole of the genre. Cozy farming games aren’t always set on an actual farm (sometimes it’s a graveyard or a workshop) and although they are about life, calling them life “sims” has always felt a little incorrect too. Out of desperation I just call them “games like Stardew” a lot, but sometimes they’re really more like Animal Crossing, actually.

Too many other emergent game genres have gone the way of the ugly “game-like” suffix: roguelikes, soulslikes, and even the survivorlikes—though we’re workshopping that genre name too.

Stardew-like is worse than all of those combined. Not only will the occasional pedant point out that it should really be Harvest Moon-like—though I’m of the opinion that the honor belongs with the game that eclipsed its own inspiration, not the series whose naming rights snafu makes the legacy of the series a headache to track. It also just sucks to say.

Long after I’d given up thinking this was a solvable problem, the answer came to me—as I was complaining about fishing, of all things. Much as I despise it as a minigame, fishing is one of the core activities of a Stardew-style farming sim. You might call it one of the main pillars of the genre. One of the four big Fs, even.

Wait, we have a genre like this already: 4X games. Like Stardew and its ilk, they’re a specific subset of a broader genre (strategy games), grouped together by a common set of game systems they share—explore, expand, exploit, exterminate—not one common ancestor like roguelikes or an easy acronym like FPS.

Stardew games have that too. They’re a subset of simulation games, neither life sim nor crafting sim nor job sim, but identifiable by a handful of specific elements they pretty universally include. They can be 4F games: farm, forage, fish, friendship.

Or maybe it should be: food, forage, fish, friendship to account for the games that don’t actually involve farming. Or perhaps it’s a sort of three-out-of-four checklist to identify if a game is “one of those.” Look, one way or another I think the 4F thing has legs, alright?

It has the capacity to capture the Stardew Valley-alikes and the Animal Crossing-inspired games without accidentally lumping in Farming Simulator 25 and The Sims.

But does it actually work? Let’s check it against some of my favorite farmlife-y things from the past couple of years and some that are yet to come:

That actually came out even more uniform than I expected. Okay, here are some edge cases then.

What about Rusty’s Retirement, the adorable idle game that was one of my favorite cozy games last year? It has farming, but not foraging, fishing, or friendship. It really isn’t a Stardew or Animal Crossing-like game, but it does have those vibes. With only one of the 4Fs accounted for is it a 4F-like?

How about Fallout 76? It’s not a Stardew-like game at all in my book, but after adding fishing in an update this summer as it’s planned to, it will have all four Fs: farming, foraging for supplies, fishing, and the companion character friendship and romances. That feels like one of those “is a taco a sandwich?” situations.

Maybe the concept of time simulation is important to capture since it’s an element that’s important, if slightly different, in both Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley style games. Who knows a good ‘F’ word for “time”?

Game genre name will always be a source of banter and disagreement, but I’m confident that 4Fs are better than the stardewcrossinglike mouthful I’ve had to write for the past nine years.