Haunted Chocolatier is the next game from Stardew Valley creator ConcernedApe, aka Eric Barone. We’ve gotten little morsels of information since the game’s announcement, and a sweet new tidbit just came out of an interview.
Barone composes music through Reason Studios, and he sat down for an interview on the program’s YouTube channel. During the course of the interview (at about an hour and 37 minutes in), Barone dropped the words “boss battle,” a mechanic noticeably absent from Stardew Valley. The news broke as Barone debuted a battle theme for a “bee boss.” You can hear the news and listen to the track below:
The boss battle theme uses synthesizers, an instrument you don’t really hear in the Stardew Valley soundtrack. “[Haunted Chocolatier] is a little darker,” Barone explained. “There are ghosts, so I feel like synthesizers make sense.” We already knew that combat would be in the game, but hearing about full-on boss battles is intriguing.
As for other mechanics, Barone did confirm that there will be relationships in Haunted Chocolatier, as there were in Stardew Valley. We don’t know when we can dig into all this fun stuff though — the new game has no release date at this time. Furthermore, Barone is currently working on more games beyond Haunted Chocolatier.