Why are so many many devs obsessed with calendars and clocks? It only makes the game stressful.
Not really.
Time limits can make games stressful, but when used right, it can encourage players to think carefully about resource management and encourage player agency.
Take Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons or Rune Factory.
The whole thing is premised around managing your time throughout ingame years.
The Persona games make pretty good use of it too.
Granted, there's a time limit of one ingame year, but they never made me feel stressed or anything like that.
Indie games, particularly of the sandboxy/adventure game type like Harem Hotel Aurelia have time too.
Literally no game I've played with time management has ever been 'stressful' because of those elements themselves but rather how well or poorly they're implemented so, I have to disagree with the view that having time/calendars makes games more stressful.
In fact, about the only time that time management in a game is outright objectively a bad thing is if it can soft lock the player due to missing event/item X on day/time period Y, like Dark Seed 1 where you only had 3 ingame days to get everything done.
'That' can be stressful, but that was also a game that came out in the mid 90's too, so I can't really be as harsh on it due to players back then not being the entitled babies they are today.
This isn't really an issue that exists in the VAST majority of indie games where time management is a mechanic.
Literally, the most you can say is that you have to wait or play with the calendar a bit.
But, if you 'still' think that equals stressful, then.... you might need to seriously considering playing something else.
Again, it's all about how you implement time in a game.
