At Summer Game Fest, I tried a game that was bold enough to ask: Why doesn’t Stardew Valley have more murder? Grave Seasons, due out next year, is a cozy farming sim with a morbid edge: It’s about all the friends (and romantic partners) you make along the bloody way to stopping a serial killer.

A little bit into the short demo of Grave Seasons, I took to the fields to clean up the run-down farm I’d broken into and decided to adopt, only to find a severed hand. It’s fitting for an indie title published by Blumhouse Games, a division of Blumhouse Productions, which, with the gaming unit, began expanding beyond its work in horror films to publish titles like last year’s Fear the Spotlight.

Grave Seasons is a cozy horror game that seems like it will deftly mix the serene and gruesome, appealing to fans of Dredge and other calming games tinged with the sinister. Players take on the role of a prison escapee who breaks into, and adopts, a farm in the town of Ashenridge, only to find that it’s riddled with dark secrets.

But it wasn’t just occult labs in the basement and body parts unearthed from the fields that made the game feel delightfully grim. After I’d made some early friends, my demo ended with a shocking twist: One of my new pals, who asked me to join them for a midnight walk in the nearby woods, got ambushed by a hideous monster and brutally murdered. Even the game’s charming sprite graphics didn’t spare my eyes from the ick of dismemberment. 

«We are huge fans of games that blend that sort of coziness mixed with a sense of unease,» said Emmett Nahil, narrative designer at studio Perfect Garbage, which developed Grave Seasons (Blumhouse is the publisher). Nahil cited games like Dredge, Into The Woods and Cult of the Lamb as inspirations.

In Grave Seasons, these murders happen seasonally, said lead programmer Nicky Armstrong. But you have enough time between sowing crops and cleaning up your farm to figure out what might be happening. You can try to befriend the many people you meet around town, and even discover who the killer is. 

But if you’re playing Grave Seasons alongside real-life friends, don’t worry about them spoiling the killer’s identity for you — the game’s inspired design randomly assigns the murderer from a subset of the approximately 40 characters you encounter in the game. Like any good cozy farming game, you can romance many of them, including the hunky Hari that I met first in the demo. And in an even better twist, the person you’re romancing might end up being the killer, too.

Beyond video games, Nahil cited folk horror and monster films as inspirations that led to Grave Seasons’ unique tone. 

«The original Wicker Man is actually a huge inspiration for me,» Nahil said. «We have some really cool events [in Grave Seasons] that tell you a bit more about the lore of the world. Obviously, creature features like early Hammer Horror are a huge one for me, where you get to see different monsters, different creatures, and there’s a sort of sense of pathos that goes along with those creatures.»

Another design quirk that sets Grave Seasons apart is starting the game with a protagonist on the lam from prison — a departure from Stardew Valley and other farming sims where it’s good vibes from the get-go. Instead, in this game players start with a sense of tension, since they can’t go to the cops about the serial killer prowling around town.

«It helps place the player in the idea that they are on their own and have to use their wits, and really focus on their skills to help the town and themselves — or hinder the town and help the killer,» Nahil said.

In other words, a playthrough of Grave Seasons can go several different ways depending on the randomized killer and the choices players make. That was a design choice for Perfect Garbage, which wanted to divert from the indefinite playtime of Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon games in order to tell a story.

«We really want you to experience the narrative that we’ve crafted and play the game to its conclusion … whether that is a positive or a negative conclusion,» Armstrong said. «We still want you to experience it to its end and have a really good time with one playthrough of the game, and then we’d love for you to play it again and experience a different story, a different killer, a different outcome.»

That storytelling applies to the killers, too. Whether romanceable or not, all characters have a backstory to discover as you befriend and get closer to them. The potential murderers have motivations and storylines that the player can dig into, which will change elements within the world that they might discover and ask around about.

But in closing, I asked Armstrong and Nahil perhaps the most important question: Which of the game’s 40 or so characters would they date? 

«Oh, my boy Hari is right there in the demo, yeah,» said Armstrong.

«He’s not in the demo, but Noah, honestly,» Nahil said. «Our buff fisherman is my romance of choice.»

That’s amusing to know, but it also shows that the game contains multitudes. Many other farming sims have the cozy part down, but Grave Seasons seems like it’ll let the discomfort of morbid effects and murder be a counterweight tension that complexifies the comforting monotony of farming. Amid alternating between growing life and fearing for your own, why wouldn’t you find someone to date? 

Grave Seasons is scheduled to come out on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch in 2026.