Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley is a farming sim in the sense that farming is where you start. Within twenty hours it is also a combat game, a fishing game, a small-town social sim and a fairly demanding optimisation problem about how to spend a finite number of in-game hours per day. Eric Barone built and has maintained essentially all of it alone, and the coherence shows.

The multiplayer addition is what puts it on this list. Up to four players share one farm, one budget and one calendar, which turns the daily routine into a logistics conversation, someone has to water, someone has to mine, and the day ends whether you finished or not. It plays well on everything and is one of the cheapest entries here.