izigame.me

Never having played My Time at Portia, I recently took a gamble on My Time at Sandrock, after repeatedly hearing it described as Stardew Valley with better graphics. While that is a fair description, I think it undersells the fact that Sandrock has several unique qualities that make it stand out even in the genre, and which led to me getting hooked for dozens and dozens of hours.

One thing that is immediately obvious is that the game oozes atmosphere, with plenty of memorable characters, and the writers/localization team did a great job consistently coming up with entertaining, funny, and witty situations and lines. Just about everything has a Saturday morning cartoon vibe to it, in a good way, which makes it suitable for younger audiences, while also containing many references that adults will enjoy. As far as the overarching narrative is concerned, I feel like they played things too straight at times, leading to predictability, but perhaps not subverting expectations is itself subversive at this point.
The voice acting is generally good, but notably uneven in quality, where it is easy to tell that experienced VAs were paired with less experienced ones. This can be jarring to hear on occasion, but perhaps it can be seen as a positive that they were willing to give unknown actors a chance.

Mechanically and in terms of design as well, there is much to admire about Sandrock. It is very good at keeping you invested by steadily drip-feeding the happy chemicals as you complete quests, finish projects, improve your relationships with NPCs, expand your lot, and so on. When you are tasked with improving infrastructure around town, for example, those upgrades will be permanently visible, and sometimes have a practical effect as well, making the player feel as if their actions have consequences. There are many quality-of-life features that were much appreciated, such as different types of storage all being linked to each other, so that your entire storage can be accessed all at once. After a certain point, you can also start hiring NPCs to start gathering resources for you, reducing tedium in that regard. There are many more examples that all show that much thought was put into the design, including the UI.

As with any game, there are unfortunately also negatives to point out. While the story and characters are entertaining and well-done overall, I feel that the game suffers from serious pacing issues. You will be stuck at certain stages of machine/character development for much longer than others, and the narrative climax occurs when the main story is about two-thirds done, after which it continues meandering for another 40 hours or so. Many players will never finish the main story at all, because it takes such a long time to do so, and it feels like the stakes are no longer there after a certain point.
Sandrock was overall stable for me, and I experienced almost no game-breaking bugs or glitches, but NPC pathfinding on the whole is very wonky, and you will often see them behave in unintended, occasionally bizarre ways. There is also still a bug with the feather duster where sometimes you will not be able to get the 'sand-clogged' icon to go away from a machine unless you pick it up and put it back down. Apparently this has been in the game ever since release, which is an unacceptably long time for such a basic issue to be fixed. I also strongly suspect that some of the NPC relationship boosts are not working correctly, particularly the +5 Stamina boosts that you are supposed to get from reaching a certain tier with characters such as Burgess and Venti. There are also still numerous typos sprinkled throughout the text, despite the fact that the game has been out for more than eight months. I can understand that it is not a priority to fix these, but it does create a slightly amateur impression.
Finally, even though the game is generally well-designed, I have to subtract marks for the way player inventory is handled specifically. They decided to have things like relic pieces and quest items count towards your overall inventory limit, meaning that you will be forced to engage in tedious inventory management throughout the entire game, no matter how many extra inventory slots you buy. This is highly questionable for a game released in 2023, and had a significant negative impact on my enjoyment at times.

Overall, if I had to summarize Sandrock in a single sentence, I would say that it is exactly what you're probably expecting, but better. As a game, at every turn it shows that it has plenty of heart, and it is generally well-designed in a way that effortlessly strings along the player from milestone to milestone. Even though I listed a number of complaints, most of these are not deal breakers, and many will likely be addressed through future patches and hotfixes (perhaps with the exception of the atrocious inventory management). I can therefore easily recommend it to anyone the slightest bit interested in the life sim genre.