I have such a love/hate relationship with Stardew Valley, slightly less so with My Time At Portia (the developers seem to have at least considered wrist strain in the button layout and mechanics). I long for a moneyless, classless game in this genre where the incentives are community thriving, trust, pleasure, and all the other aspects that make life worth worth living outside of capitalism. Does that game exist?
Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles … but with the caveats that a) it’s only PARTLY like stardew/portia/harvestmoon and b) For the life of me I can’t remember if the game had money or not.
The game is partly farm-life-sim, but the other part is “zelda-like” adventuring and getting rid of “dark smoke thing” that does bad things to the world.
It has a barter system, but you don’t need to use it if you don’t want to. Nearly everything you need in the game can be harvested or made.
Their other game, Grow: Song of the Evertree, is pretty fun too. It’s partly a city builder, partly exploring new worlds that you create. It’s been a while since I played it, so I remember some sort of currency, but I don’t really remember having to work that hard for it. Mostly, I just focused on creating worlds with crazy elements.
