Haunted Chocolatier Is ‘More of an Action RPG’ Than Stardew Valley, ConcernedApe Says

Haunted Chocolatier is shaping up to be a much more action-heavy game than Stardew Valley, creator Eric Barone said in a wide-ranging interview with British GQ published October 12. The follow-up to the 2016 farming sim, now over four years into development, is “more of an action RPG” with “monsters” and “boss fights” at its core, Barone said.

“It is still what I call a town game,” Barone told GQ, “but it’s more of an action RPG — the main focus is more about adventuring, finding equipment and getting more powerful. There are monsters, there are boss fights.” He added: “It’s for the people in Stardew Valley that go into the mines. That’s what I do, honestly.”

As Eurogamer points out, Stardew already had combat, but it was mostly confined to the mines, where players fought monsters such as slimes for rare materials. But the framing is a marked shift for a project that has, until now, been pitched as a cozy, supernatural town game. Barone also called the new title “more metaphysical” than Stardew, which fits its ghost-and-spirits setting. GQ frames the new game as Barone’s “difficult second album”, and he admitted he has been struggling to recapture how it felt to make Stardew when nobody was watching.

Barone is still making Haunted Chocolatier on his own, and he told GQ he hasn’t let anyone play it yet, not even his partner, Amber. “No one’s playing the game until I’m ready to show it,” he said. “If you have a turkey in the oven, you’re not going to pull it out halfway and have the guests taste it, right? It needs to be done.” The last public update came in January, when Barone wrote “I’m alive, the game is still in development”. He had already said he didn’t want to give a release date. It is not on the Release Calendar yet, and Barone has not set a window.

The pressure is real. Stardew Valley has now sold over 50 million copies since 2016, according to GQ, and still regularly clears 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, a remarkable run for a one-person project. (You can see the current live counts on our Steam Player Counts page.) Barone has turned down in-game collaborations with established franchises, GQ reports, and has only brought in outside help for marketing and for coding Stardew’s multiplayer. He name-checks David Lynch as an inspiration and believes there is an artistic purity to creating in isolation.

Our read: anyone who picked up Stardew for the fishing and the friendships should probably reset their expectations. Barone is leaning into adventuring, gear and bosses this time, though he still calls it a town game. First announced in 2021, Haunted Chocolatier is now over four years into development, and GQ notes it is edging toward GTA 6 territory. Barone himself says he isn’t expecting to repeat Stardew’s “once in a generation” success, and that is probably the healthiest way to approach a follow-up to a 50-million seller.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report