Once players unlock the Adventurer’s Guild, they can become initiated. New weapons, boots, and rings can be purchased after completing the Guild’s Monster Eradication Goals, which require players to find and defeat various types of monsters in different areas of the game. The northwestern portion of the map, the Desert, contains Skull Cavern, consisting of a virtually infinite series of floors in which players can find treasures and fight monsters. Two of the creatures encountered in Skull Cavern are Egyptian mummies: regular mummies, and ‘dangerous’ mummies, the latter dealing increased damage and boasting increased HP. They are walking mummies covered in bandages with glowing eyes (blue for regular mummies, red for dangerous ones). Their modus operandi is swarming players and overcoming them with numbers, a behavior similar to that of mummies in other games such as Diablo II (2000), The Mummy (2000), and the Metal Slug series (1998-2022). When defeated, these creatures’ bodies disappear with a squelching noise and a pile of bandages falls to the floor where they stood. Unless subsequently destroyed with explosives the mummies rematerialize from these piles of bandages. These vindictive ambulatory mummies associated with traits of decadence and body horror are yet another manifestation in videogames of a trope that became popular in American and British movies in the 1930s but which had its origins in earlier literature: the decomposing, rotten, evil ‘Oriental’ body reanimated by means of dark magic. Interestingly, the inhabitants of Stardew Valley seem to participate in their own form of Egyptomania: during the annual Desert Festival, one of the merchants sells Mummy Masks, that is, masks shaped like the heads of the mummies residing inside Skull Cavern.

Author: Kate Minniti