I have spent a few weeks talking to video-game voice actors, the real humans who bring verve and humour to our gaming experiences. Some of them have won major awards for their work. None of them have had a meaningful pay rise in over 10 years, despite the industry's exponential growth. They are furious – and they have every right to be. Over the weekend, Hellena Taylor, who played the lead character in Bayonetta, Platinum Games' stylish action series about a hypersexualised angel-killing witch who fights with extreme flair, went public with her frustrations.

Before Farmville, before Stardew Valley, there was Harvest Moon – a Japanese farming game dating to 1996, when tending virtual crops and cows was new to video games. Created by Yasuhiro Wada, who wanted to convey the goodness of rural life, Harvest Moon has for most of this time been a straightforward escape-to-the-country fantasy about building up an abandoned farmstead and making a life in a nearby village. As vegetables grew, animals matured and friendships developed, you'd get sucked into the game's predictable seasonal rhythms and gentle busywork. Since 2014, however, Harvest Moon has been in the hands of new developers, and let's just say that changes have been made. In One World, you do not move to a dilapidated farm; you pack up and explore a small continent of boring branching pathways that take a long time to walk down, and the occasional desert village or fishing town.

I missed one-man-developer Eric Barone's Stardew Valley the first time round, back in early 2016 when the quaint farming simulation appeared without ceremony on Windows. By the time I realized I'd pulled a Gob Bluth, publisher Chucklefish had announced a version for Nintendo's totable Switch, so I waited. And now it's here, a downloadable $14.99 version I can take anywhere and that plays like all the others -- no kludgy smartphone or tablet touchscreen compromises. I'm still getting my sea legs, but the idea of rolling up my sleeves and, as Voltaire put it, cultivating my garden, is appealing for all kinds of reasons. I live in Iowa near the edge of a midsize city circled by rolling farmland.