Stardew Valley creator breaks silence to shoot down myths about Haunted Chocolatier, including that 2030 release rumour

"I’m alive, the game is still in development, and it will come out when it’s ready"

Stardew Valley creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has emerged from the giant Easter egg in which he makes games to “debunk a few myths and false assumptions” about Haunted Chocolatier, his forthcoming sticky-fingered life sim. The good news is that he’s been “very productive” lately, though he admits that he “shouldn’t have announced the game so early”, which suggests we’ve a ways to go yet before the first proper Haunted Chocolatier trailer or info blowout.

Myth and/or false assumption number one is that Barone will ultimately abandon Haunted Chocolatier and turn the game into a chunky update for Stardew Valley - much like a patisserie chef tipping the scorched remains of a failed crème brûlée all over an award-winning dark forest gateau.

“First, I am not going to abandon Haunted Chocolatier,” Barone retorts in a new blog post. “But even if I did, I am not going to add it to Stardew Valley. Stardew Valley and Haunted Chocolatier are separate games. It doesn’t even make sense from a technical perspective, as Haunted Chocolatier is written from scratch, it’s not the same ‘engine’ as Stardew Valley. You can’t just copy and paste Haunted Chocolatier into Stardew Valley.”

(Full clarification in the interests of public health and culinary decency: you can’t reuse spoiled crème brûlée as a dark forest gateau topping either. You will only injure your digestive system and bring shame upon your family.)

The second myth Barone wishes to rebut is that Stardew Valley updates are sneaky testing grounds for Haunted Chocolatier features. “When working on Stardew Valley, I’m not thinking about Haunted Chocolatier, and vice versa,” he clarifies. “I wouldn’t ‘test something out’ in Stardew Valley because that would be unfair to Stardew Valley, and also I don’t want to spoil ideas for Haunted Chocolatier by adding them first to Stardew Valley. Also, Stardew Valley is a different game, so you can’t really ‘test something’ for Haunted Chocolatier in it in an accurate way.”

Myth No. 3 is that Barone is making another Stardew Valley update because he’s “burnt out on Haunted Chocolatier”. Nay, sirrah, you do but jest! Rest assured that Barone is making another Stardew Valley update simply because “it’s a very popular game with a large, ever-growing playerbase, and I still have additional ideas for how to improve it.”

Also, he didn’t say it’s not coming out until 2030, whatever you may have read on some other lousy videogame website operated by FOOLS. “I was asked in 2025 if it would come out within the next five years, and I said ‘I hope so’,” Barone writes in closing. “This is very different than saying ‘it’s coming out in 2030’. The bottom line is, I don’t want to give a release date. The game will come out when it’s done.”

I hope you’ve all learned a valuable lesson here about rumour and speculation. Remember that videogames, much like crème brûlées, benefit from extended time in the oven and, dare I say, a degree of emotional detachment. I’m trying to figure out the videogame equivalent for blowtorching the crust. Day-one hotfixing, I guess?