At long last I have finally finished the main storylines in My Time At Sandrock, a game I started playing in November. That’s a LONG time to be playing one game and my save file sits at something like 140 hours right now. I think the TLDR version of my review is: I can’t wait for My Time At Evershine [the next game in the series] to come out.
Yeah I really enjoyed Sandrock. It’s a life sim/crafting game. You know the drill. You inherit a delapidated old farm/workshop and need to fix it up. In this case you are a Builder which means you’re primarily harvesting/crafting though there is also some farming and animal raising aspects. Plus improving your relationships with the town folk, and in this case, some monster-battling as well. It’s basically the Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley theme only the emphasis is more on crafting than farming.
The chance that anyone reading this HASN’T ever played a game like this is so slim, let’s just move on to the setting and my likes and dislikes.
The “My Time At…” games take place in a post-apocalyptic future where there is constant tension between the Church of the Light which shuns technology since it was what led to the end of the old world, and the folks who want to unearth old relics and bring back the tech that made life better. This was a bigger issue in My Time At Portia but there’s still some tension around that in Sandrock.
The storyline
There are two main plotlines. Sandrock is a desert town that is fading towards ghost town status due to an ever dwindling water supply. The machines in your workshop need water to cool them, as well as wood or some material to burn in order to power them. The latter is easy, but keeping enough water on-hand is a challenge, early on. You can build “dew collectors” that slowly accumulate water, or you can buy it from a vendor. You also collect some while gathering plants and things.
Anyway, I was talking about plotlines. So the first one is to try to pull Sandrock back from the brink. You’re working with a fellow named Zeke who is trying to develop a way to grow trees in the desert, the idea being that if he can get trees to grow, it’ll help prevent the awful sandstorms that plague the town which in turn might lead to the ground becoming more fertile. Or something. Anyway the other plotline is that the town is being menaced by a group of bandits, the leader of which used to be a well-liked citizen of the town. No one knows why he’s gone bad or what to do about him. At first this is none of your concern since you’re a builder, not local law enforcement. But surprise! The Civil Corp (the constabulary) have taken notice of how well you dispatch monsters and presses you into service in their hunt for the bandits.
The bad stuff
My only real gripe was the pacing. Early on your days are hectic as you try to balance gathering materials, doing “Commissions” to rank up your workshop so that you can unlock access to new blueprints, and keeping those two questlines moving forward. You are ‘gated’ by both time and stamina, though stamina can be replenished eating certain foods. For the first 100 hours this worked well, but then a couple of things happened. One is that the initial plotlines were resolved, but that wasn’t the end of the storyline as it turns out. But after that point it felt like there was less to do and I found myself looking for ways to kill in-game time, or even just going to bed at 10 am to end the day.
But something else happened which I think just broke my brain a little. I was playing on Playstation and I earned the “Platinum” trophy at around the 100 hour mark too. Because of this I assumed I MUST be near the end of the game, so I was in “OK let’s finish this up” mode mentally, but the game ran on for another 30-40 hours. I think without that trophy pop-up everything might have felt more natural.
The ‘meh’ stuff
Next, not really a gripe but a place I would like to see improvement was the relationship stuff. You can take characters out on “dates” and do activities with them to make them happy, but really there weren’t very many of these and every date wound up about the same. I would have liked to see more variety there. The worst was when I’d take Grace out. Grace is a waitress at the only restaurant in town. So I had to take her to her workplace for dinner while we were on our date. I’m amazed she didn’t get angry about that!
There was also a game system where you would go into ‘dungeons’ and fight monsters. Combat isn’t really a strong point for the game. It’s fine but not super compelling. So I did these dungeons as infrequently as possible. The fact that they were timed didn’t help with my personal enjoyment as I hate feeling rushed.
The good stuff!
So what did I like about it? I mean on a basic level I really enjoy these kinds of games, but specifically I liked a few quality of life additions that not all games like this have. First, you can save anywhere, anytime, except in the middle of a fight. Many games in this genre only have an auto-save when you go to bed at night, and don’t have a manual save option. Not sure why that is but I’m glad Sandrock dropped this limitation. Second, you can adjust how fast time goes by. I slowed it down in the early parts of the game and just let Stamina be my main limiter. I didn’t like the feeling that I had to run from task to task if I wanted to fit everything into a day. Later when I had less to do I put the speed back to normal and sometimes up to 3X which I think is as fast as it went.
There is some tie-in to My Time At Portia. Not to the point where you need to have played that one to enjoy this one, but if you HAVE played Portia you’ll probably get a kick out of some of the references, including some references to your character in THAT game (in an abstract way). Evershine is supposed to take place in the same world as well.
The telanovella stuff
Beyond the mechanics, I enjoyed the plotlines and most of the characters. There are romance options and I had fun with these. I started dating one character, but then she saw me giving a hug to another character (hugs being a way to improve your relationship with characters). Both she and the character I hugged got mad at me and my relationship value with both dropped way down. Jeez it was just a friendly, platonic hug!!! Later I romanced another character but she was concerned that a relationship would hurt both our careers, so I got a sidequest where I had to come in 1st place in the monthly workshop ratings list while also finding time to take her on 4 dates. Challenge accepted! [The screenshot at the top of this post is from one of our dates.]
I did it, of course, and we got married. Nothing unseemly here. You do need a 2 person bed and you sleep together but everyone stays safely dressed while in bed. There’s a baby crib you can get but I never explored having a child. I guess it can be done.
This marriage didn’t really take. My wife was lovely but I’d only really married her due to that sidequest. Eventually I divorced her, which was very amicable and aside from a relationship hit, it didn’t really change anything. We went back to the same conversations we’d had before we married.
Eventually I took a second wife. What a lady’s man I am! This one stuck and we were still happily married when the game ended. I think you can put your spouse to work but I never really did.
You can also adopt pets, and those I DID put to work… they’ll go out and harvest materials for you. Mostly I’d send them to collect water.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but bottom line is, I liked My Time at Portia when I played it, and I liked My Time at Sandrock even more. Bring on My Time at Evershine!
I played My Time at Sandrock for almost 20 hours but ended up falling off the game. I think the desert setting didn’t really appeal to me. And as for Portia, I couldn’t get into the graphics. I’m really looking forward to My time at Evershine though!
Portia’s graphics were hard for me to get past, too. It took me a couple of starts before I got past them and had fun and that, in turn, kind of got me past the desert landscape of Sandrock.
And while I think the Sandrock graphics are a big improvement over Portia, it still bugged me that I looked so young when some of the dateable women were clearly MUCH older than me.
Now I’m looking for my next game. I was thinking Starsand Island but it is in Early Access and the chance of me playing it twice is pretty low, so I’d prefer to wait for launch.
Any ideas?
I have a feeling you’d like Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, if you haven’t already played it. It’s on the pricier side but it seems it’s getting a good discount when it goes on a sale.
I’m the same about Early Access. Even though I made an exception here and there for games that I was really interested, I don’t mind waiting for full release.
Thanks! I put Guardians of Azuma on my Wishlist. Now we wait for a sale… 🙂
I’m showing 49 hours /played on Sandrock whereas I had 105 in Portia. I agree that Sandrock is an improvement on Portia is pretty much every way… but yeah, you cap out really early and are left with nothing much to do by the midgame. I ended up stopping because I had literally no quests, or at least no in-game understanding of what I needed to do next. If I recall correctly, the next story event required me to wait 7-10 days or something. Killed the magic.
Yeah and at times it does that with no indication that anything else is coming. You have no quests, nothing to do but commissions which by then you can bang out in like 5 minutes of real life time. Then a few days later something new pops up. At one point I actually googled to see if there was a “The End” screen because I thought “Maybe I’ve done everything?”
Hopefully the pacing of the next game will be better.
I put nearly 70 hours into Portia although I never finished it. I stopped because it reached the point where it felt like I was just doing the same things over and over to no particular end. I liked it so much, all the same, that I bought into Sandrock at the earliest available slot in Early Access. I was that keen to play!
And then I put in just eight hours and gave up. I told myself I was going to wait until it came out of EA but the last time I logged in was June 2022! I occasionally think about playing but somehow I never do. I think now I might just skip Sandrock altogether and come back for Evershine, which looks like a really exciting prospect.
My main concern for Evershine, though, is the apparent emphasis on the romances. I really, strongly dislike romances in any game. They creep me out, to be precise. I avoided them completely in Portia except once or twice when something seemed to be locked behind at least initiating one. I really wish games that are ostensibly about crafting or building or adventure but also have this feature would allow you to disable it in the Options. I get that some games are designed around it and that’s fine – I can just avoid those altogether – but a lot of games seem to think you can’t have an adventure without some romance and I just don’t think the two things go together as well as they believe they do.
In Sandrock, at least, there was that one quest I mentioned, and there was a Trophy you got for getting married, but other than that you could just avoid the romance stuff. Maybe the marketing for Evershine is just pushing that aspect because a lot of folks like that stuff (for example Stardew Valley just came out with a 10th anniversary update and what did it add? More people to romance!) and it won’t be required.
Though if generally speaking you just don’t like the relationship-building stuff, that did sort of matter in Sandrock because as people liked you more it would unlock perks. Of course you get a lot of relationship exp just from doing quests that help the town so even there you could treat it as a passive aspect of the game.
One of the reasons I ‘divorced’ my first wife in Sandrock was that it felt so awkward. The day would start, we’d climb out of bed. She’s say “Good morning, how did you sleep last night?” or something and there was no way for me to respond. If I clicked on her to talk to her, it would just be a generic Chat scene, as if we were out on the street. So all I could do is ignore her friendly greeting and walk away which just felt rotten!