Steam’s Latest Great Stardew Valley Clone Completely Reimagines the Farming Sim

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August 18, 2026

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Published Aug 18, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT

Swap your watering can for a tarot deck

Steam's latest great Stardew Valley clone completely reimagines the farming sim

Farming sims usually follow a familiar, comforting formula. If you, like me, have played your fair share, you already know what you’re in for before you start. You plant crops, you water them, you harvest, sell, rinse, repeat. Ritual of Raven, by Spellgarden Games, sets up a similar conceit, right up until it catches you with a twist. You’ve got a pixel art village, a cute little plot with your name on it, a beguilingly witchy world that I would move to in a heartbeat…but then you try to touch a plant. Turns out, you can’t do that. Your bare hands ruin plant magic. No watering cans for you!

Instead of the usual hotbar of farming tools that you see in games like Stardew Valley, in Ritual of Raven, you get a deck of tarot cards. You spend your days shuffling those cards to program a stone robot to water your crops for you. Now, enchanting a construct doesn’t really feel like farming, but it does carry a similar sense of satisfaction. You drag your construct’s little pot-shaped body onto a tile, then snap an action card onto it. Initially, it’s a clunky process, but as is the case with automating things in real life, after you get it, your grinding goes on autopilot. You’ll be able to water more plants than you could have dreamed of caring for solo. Sure, your construct might accidentally water a fence or two instead of a crop bed, but that’s no big deal.

Once you get the hang of the farming-via-programming-via-tarot mechanic, you’ll be able to meet the quirky characters around you…who may or may not have their own agendas. Sage, the witch you’re rooming with, is more than okay to accept you as a trade for her own recently vanished familiar, Flufferstoop. She trains you just long enough for you to get your own familiar, a raven named Raven (don’t worry; he’s got strong opinions about this naming choice) before vanishing herself. You’re left with Raven and a grimoire. And an entire village hankering to send you on fetch quests. Each villager will want specific gifts, not just whatever you happen to be holding – rosemary for Dan, who runs the diner; elderflowers for Umbrielle.

As you get to the close of another 20-minute day, you can fish at the edge of a portal. Much like the farming-turned-programming, you’re not really fishing; you’re operating a claw machine to snatch shadows before they dart away or vanish into the void. If you catch something, you can keep it, sell it, or donate to one of the three town museums (one for spell fragments, one for crystals, one for ostensibly useless items, like a block of tofu, a claw clip, or, simply, space trash). It’s a bit of a trap for completionists, but it’s fun enough that you forget you’re doing chores. In true farming-ish sim fashion, between the fishing, the time you can sink into home decor, and paging through your grimoire, it’s entirely possible to go through this game without touching the main story for hours on end.

Now, if you’re coming to Ritual of Raven from something like Fields of Mistria, there are going to be some curveballs for you. The construct system does take some time to learn, and you’ll make mistakes — I did, everyone does! — as you figure it out. You’ll forget to check field conditions and water the wrong plot several times. And if you’re a fan of open worlds, the linearity of Ritual of Raven may take some getting used to. The game hides a lot of intriguing side content behind main story beats…beats that may require very specific work, like crossbreeding 16 of a very specific hybrid flower that you’ll need to coax into flourishing during a very specific phase of the moon. It can be precise and finicky, but if you like the people you’re farming with, it doesn’t feel tedious.

And that’s why you play this game: The characters, the art, and the story that keeps building on itself long after you’ve mastered the tarot-card farming mechanic. Umbrielle, the game’s invisible presence, will spend her arc eavesdropping and spreading gossip, before her story ends with her, possibly, becoming visible and owning her own newspaper — how appropriate and heartwarming! Coco, the former Seedseer running the seed shop, might rope you into helping her run a tabletop campaign for a fellow villager, which first feels like it’s distracting you from your objectively more important tasks…but that’ll become the reason you keep coming back to the game. Save the village from the unstable portals making life weird for everyone, sure, but finish Coco’s campaign first. You’ll close Ritual of Raven every in-game night telling yourself you’ll tackle just one more quest. You’ll always be wrong.

Ritual of Raven is out now on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC.