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So how has Stardew Valley, ostensibly the opposite of current trends, achieved its rise to the top? Though it seems to have little in common with gaming’s apocalyptic portraits of the future, it and other bucolic farming simulators actually provide a necessary counterpart. The gameplay in farming simulators involves organizing people, animals, and the natural environment, planting crops in systematic patterns and experiencing a routine life while playing a key role in a small community. Their picture of a lost era of tightly knit villages where humans lived in organic harmony with nature complements prophesies of a dystopic future in which humans are regimented components of a remorseless capitalistic machine. Farming simulators placate a need for a collective and organized past as an alternative to contemporary chaos.

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This may make Stardew Valley seem like a criticism of modern capitalism, but in fact it does little to critique the supposed inevitability of capitalism. Instead it provides the missing piece in a linear account of human history that traces our decline from pastoral paradise to the sterile postcapitalist desert. The best we can do is take comfort in memories and in the fact that we are not further along the inescapable path of destruction.

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In the case of Stardew Valley, its romanticization of the past serves only to solidify our fear of the future. It teaches us to deal with contemporary alienation through wistful backward glances at an irretrievable past. Though it seems innocuous enough, it resonates with Donald Trump’s calls to “make America great again,” as well as with various European dreams of exiting the E.U. to return to some prelapsarian national serenity in isolation.

As the game’s Joja Corporation — a blend of Wal-mart, Coca-Cola, and Google — starts its inevitable takeover of your peaceful village economy, Stardew Valley‘s nationalistic indictment of internationalism becomes unmistakable. This is no left critique of corporate globalization but a call for isolationist retreat. Stardew Valley’s image of small-scale self-sufficiency draws from the same impulse to erect walls at borders and seek local salvation through exporting immiseration. Tellingly, the village in Stardew Valley has a bus stop but the bus has broken down, severing the connection between it and the rest of the world.

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Stardew Valley’s popularity suggests that both dystopia and utopia have been appropriated by the right to make capitalism appear the only alternative. We can dream only of tempering its destructiveness. We are still waiting for the video game that offers real hope rather than a nostalgic return to the past.