Cozy horror game grave season is Stare Valley plagued by serial killers

in Summer Game FestI tried a game bold enough to ask: Why doesn’t Stardew Valley do any more murders? Grave season, scheduled for release next year, is a cozy agricultural sim with a pathological edge. It’s about all the friends (and romantic partners) you make along the bloody way of stopping a serial killer.

After a bit of getting into a short seasonal demonstration of graves, I went to the fields and decided to clean up and adopt a broken, ruined farm. It is a fitting indie title published by Blumhouse Games, a division of Blumhouse Productions. Along with the game unit, they have begun to publish titles like last year, surpassing work on horror movies. Fear the spotlight.

Grave Seasons is a cozy horror game, and it seems like a skillful mix of things that are gentle and frightening. Players will take on the role of prison fugitives that invade and recruit farms in Ashenridge towns.

But it wasn’t just about the underground occult lab and the body parts excavated from the field that made the game enjoyable and Grimm-like. After making early friends, my demo ended with a shocking twist. One of my new companions asked me to take part in a midnight walk in a nearby forest, ambushed and brutally killed by a horrifying monster. Even the game’s engaging Sprite graphics didn’t spare my eyes from the quick demise of the dismantling.

“We’re a huge fan of games where that kind of comfort mixes a sense of anxiety,” said Emmett Nahil, story designer at Studio Perfect Garbage. Nahir cited a cult of lambs in the forest, a game like Dredge as inspiration.

During grave season, these murders occur seasonally, said lead programmer Nikki Armstrong. But there’s plenty of time to sow crops and clean the farm and understand what’s going on. You can try to be friends with the many people you meet around town, or even discover who the killer is.

But if you’re playing Grave Season with real-life friends, don’t worry about them ruining the killer identity for you – the game’s inspired design randomly assigns killers from a subset of around 40 characters you’ll encounter in the game. Like a good cozy farming game, you can romance many of them, including the hanky hari I first encountered in the demo. And with even better twists, the person you’re romancing might also become a murderer.

Beyond video games, Nahir cited folk horror and monster movies as inspiration that led to the unique tone of Grave Seasons.

“The original evil man is actually a huge inspiration for me,” Nahir said. “We have some really cool events that tell us a little more about world lore (in grave season).

Another design quirk that highlights the grave season is to start a game with the protagonist of Lamb from prison. It’s a departure from Stardew Valley and other farm sims that have a good vibe from the start. Instead, in this game, players start with tension. Because they can’t go to police about serial killers wandering around town.

“Players fall into the idea that they are themselves and have to use their wisdom and either really focus on their skills to help the town and themselves, or help them sabotage the town and help the killer,” Nahir said.

In other words, grave seasonal playthroughs can go in several different ways depending on the randomized killer and the choices the player makes. It was a design choice for Perfect Garbage, which I wanted to repurpose from Stardew Valley’s indefinite playtime and Harvest Moon Games’ indefinite playtime to tell the story.

“We really want you to experience the story we’ve united together and play the game towards that conclusion…whether it’s a positive or negative conclusion,” Armstrong said. “We still want you to go through it and have a really good time with the game playthrough, and we want you to play it again and experience another story, another murderer, another consequence.”

That storytelling also applies to the murderer. Romantic or not, every character has a backstory to discover as you become friends and get closer to them. Potential killers have motivations and storylines that players can dig into.

But in the end I asked Armstrong and Nahir the question that was probably the most important. Which of the 40 or so characters in the game will date?

“Yeah, my boy’s Hari is right there in the demonstration,” Armstrong said.

“He’s not a demonstration, but Noah, to be honest,” Nahir said. “Our buff fisherman is my romance of choice.”

It’s fun to know, but it also shows that the game contains a lot. While many other agricultural sims have a comfortable feel, serious seasons seem to be a counterweight tension that complicates the pathological effects and the discomfort of murder the monotony of agriculture’s comfort. As you alternate between life growth and your own fears, why have you never found anyone before?

Grave Season is scheduled to be released in 2026 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/s and Nintendo Switch.