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.”
The description lines up with how Stardew itself already worked for the dedicated few who liked spelunking the mines. 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. The pivot puts Barone in the same “solo dev, second-album pressure” club as the team behind Risk of Rain 2’s recent Hallowed Concepts DLC, where one small studio is also trying to follow up on a phenomenon-defining first game.
Barone is still the only person working on Haunted Chocolatier. He told GQ that he has not let anyone outside his small circle play it. “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 note on development came in January, when Barone confirmed he was still working on the game, and he has repeatedly declined 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.) For the follow-up, Barone has turned down in-game collaborations with established franchises and is keeping marketing and the Stardew multiplayer as the only outsourced work. He has cited David Lynch’s approach to working alone as one inspiration, a more solitary template than the multi-team approach of the Phantom Blade Zero team or Tropico 7’s Kalypso.
Our read: anyone who picked up Stardew for the fishing and the friendships should probably reset their expectations. Barone is leaning into combat, gear progression, and bosses this time, with the town as the hub between runs rather than the main event. The farming DNA is still in there, but the action is now the main course. The “release when it’s done” line is the same one he gave in 2021, and at four-plus years in, fans have started doing the obvious math against Rockstar’s own famously patient development. If Barone can ship a game that lands even a fraction as hard as Stardew, the second-album pressure won’t matter. If he can’t, it is.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
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