Buffy The Vampire Slayer Meets Stardew Valley In This New Horror RPG

Published Aug 20, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT

Chris is a Gaming Editor at ScreenRant. He has been a professional writer since 2009, and has written for top TV, comics, movie, and video game outlets like Engadget, Polygon, Destructoid, and more. He brings with him an expertise in every game genre, no matter how niche or mainstream.

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The farming simulator is currently thriving on Steam. You can find pretty much anything you could want, from farming simulators that are also wizard school adjacent to everything in between. A new genre game comes out each week, but you aren't really ready for this upcoming game that's set to debut in 2026.

Over on Steam, you can find one of the more interesting games in the farming simulator space, and it mixes a ton of horror, including things many Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans would love. There's something special about this one, and fans have had their eye on it for a long time.

Buffy Vibes Abound In Grave Seasons

Developed by Perfect Garbage and published by Blumhouse Games, Grave Seasons is aiming to shake up the farming simulator genre by mixing a murder mystery in.

The premise, while brief, gets the point across: "Grave Seasons is a narrative farming sim with a terrifying twist – someone in the town is a supernatural serial killer. Farm, romance, and investigate your way through the unsettling town of Ashenridge."

There is so much more happening in Grave Seasons than meets the eye. As an escaped convict trying to live his life in Ashenridge, you'll encounter a supernatural serial killer, which significantly changes the typical farming formula. Like some other simulators, you have a year to build things up, but now you have to protect people from said killer as well.

The core tenets of Grave Seasons are "farming, foraging, crafting, and investment," adding a fourth pillar to the classic simulator genre. This includes developing and maintaining relationships with townsfolk and discovering the history of Ashenridge.

Ashenridge is more than just a farm, as you can meet 30 residents and explore over 70 interior locations, including seven regions: the farm, mountainside, forest, the local Ashenridge district, the commercial district, coast and docks, and the mines.

Like a lot of other genre staples, there are four seasons in the game (spring, summer, autumn, winter), and each season has its own unique story interactions. 45 seeds are available in total across all seasons, and you'll need to find some through foraging and others through the general store. Arid, regular, and wet farming plots affect how each crop grows, and in some cases how it's watered (wet farming plots handle watering automatically).

The team even developed an invisible grid, which helps future-proof some interactions and allows more freedom for planting crops: "Our farming grid is just one of the grid layers we have in our game. Our entire game actually runs on a completely virtual grid which covers the entirety of each scene. These grids don’t affect the way that we restrict placement of art assets, or player or NPC movement, but they help us understand available player interactions in game."

This Is A Small Town Farming Sim With A Twist

I had the chance to play Grave Seasons at Summer Game Fest 2025, and it was a blast. It's overwhelming in a sense (in a good way), in that there's so much going on. As a farming simulator and a murder mystery that's enough on its own, but there are plenty of cast members to meet, too. It should be the perfect game for multiple playthroughs.

After a long wait, Grave Seasons will arrive on Steam sometime in 2026. Hopefully it won't get delayed further out, as fans have been waiting to dig into this one for a while.

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