• Price: $39.99 USD (digital), $49.99 (physical, sold out in most retail stores)
  • Furniture & Outfit DLC packs available
• Developer: Pathea Games
• Publisher: PM Studios
• Release Date: November 2, 2023

A review code was kindly provided by Renaissance PR on behalf of Pathea Games and PM Studios. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

It’s been nearly 5 years since I played My Time at Portia on Switch, and My Time at Sandrock recently came out on the console in November. I’m excited to see how Sandrock improves and…“builds” (😉) on the mechanics introduced in Portia. I don’t believe you have to play the first game to enjoy this one, but there are some characters and references from Portia that pop up here and there.

Starting up Sandrock, I named my character and chose their gender and voice. (The developer is located in China, and they’ve included English and Chinese voice acting! I decided to experience the game with English text but Chinese voice acting for some listening practice. A lot of the dialogue is voiced!)

The degree to which you get to customize your character’s appearance is pretty extensive, with sliders that increase or decrease the size of body parts (listed below):

• Skin
• Face Shape
• Hair
• Eyes & Eyebrows
• Ears, Mouth, Nose
• Facial Hair
• Face Tattoo
• Eyeshadow, Blush, Lipstick

Once you finish customizing your character, it’s time to head to Sandrock! Arriving by train, you’re given a barebones workshop by the retiring Builder. You and another character are now the new Builders in town. I guess we must have packed lightly or something, because we don’t even have the necessary tools for building when we arrive!

Foraging & Forging

Before you can do much of anything, you need to gather materials to create your building tools. Exploring the lands surrounding Sandrock and picking up useful materials to craft with is a huge part of the game. If you have the blueprint or recipe for an item, you’ll know what you need to make it.

The next step after grabbing materials is to return home and use the building facilities there. You start out with a beginner Worktable and Assembly Station; the Worktable allows you to make simpler tools, resources, and furniture, while the Assembly Station is for building more complicated machinery.

The property you’re given is pretty small, and you’ll have to expand the lot and house to fit everything you want or need there. I think the property management interface could have been more user friendly, and the furniture (and clothes) needed more variety and color. But I do like that we can increase the size of our house a little bit at a time for a few hundred Gols instead of having to wait and save up several thousand in one go.

You shouldn’t expand your house too much though, because you’ll need to fit a lot of machinery on your property to produce the goods requested by the townspeople. Using the materials you’ve acquired, you must build machines like a Furnace and Recycler to process ore and more. To keep things running smoothly, you’ll also need a lot of water and fuel.

As a Builder, your job is to take commissions from the town and its citizens. Sandrock is a city that was destroyed by the Calamity event centuries ago. The town’s motto is “conserve water” because it’s located in a desert and doesn’t have access to a lot of water or foliage. You’ll play an important part in helping to revitalize Sandrock.

For me the game gets off to a slow start, but once I got used to the mechanics again it started to pick up. You only have access to a limited amount of lower level materials at first; there are some small rocks, bushes, and trees in the immediate vicinity of Sandrock. However, you aren’t allowed to cut down any trees that close to town due to the aforementioned lack of foliage. You must settle for chopping up deadwood instead.

The salvage yard is fairly close to your property, and eventually you unlock the ability to enter the ruins to mine. Again, the materials in this first area are very basic. Use your pickax and jetpack to navigate the ruins and find ore and artifacts.

It’s worth it to pay the access fee for the ruins. I really like the way that they reset the ruins and their contents when you switch floors, as that means you don’t have to wait until the next day to get materials you need.

The animals and monsters just outside of town are mostly passive, but if you hit them they’ll come after you. Action combat isn’t a huge part of the game, but it’s still important to level up and keep your equipment up to date. Defeated enemies drop additional materials for you to use.

Limited Livestock

Just to be clear, this isn’t a farming game – your job title is Builder, after all – but it does include some limited farming capabilities. Once you build habitats for the animals on your property, you can purchase bunnies, Yakmels (cows), chickens, and mounts such as horses and camels.

If you befriend certain animals in town, you can adopt them and make them your pet. They’re all really cute and you can ask them to gather materials for you. You can also plant crops in the limited space that you have; given that water is hard to come by, I was very pleased that the water and fertilizer last for several days.

There are things like livestock and crop seeds that you just can’t get anywhere else except for the shops in town. You may even want to purchase some materials instead of crafting them if you are in a hurry and have the money to spare.

It was interesting to see how the shop prices fluctuated based on the current market conditions/events, and I greatly appreciated that unlike the stores in some other games, these stay open fairly late and don’t have days off. And you can get friendship discounts depending on your relationship with the store owners.

Sandrock Socialite

The people of Sandrock are certainly worth getting to know without shop discounts, though! There are about 50 characters to befriend over the course of the game, and nearly half of the characters are marriage candidates. Deepening your friendships allows you to learn more about each character by completing their side quests.

You can increase friendship levels using some of the usual methods, like talking to them every day or giving them gifts. Other games allow you get away with stockpiling one item to give someone, but in Sandrock people notice and have opinions on your unoriginal/low effort gifting, which is both realistic and amusing. You even earn less friendship points for giving the same item every day, so it’s best to come up with two gift ideas and switch between them.

I found the wide variety of social activities really impressive. Beyond completing commissions for people and playing a card game with them every day, you can earn points by asking them to “Play,” or hang out with you, once a week.

When you Play with someone you have a limited number of action points to participate in activities like eating together, playing arcade games, sand sledding, and more! I liked being able to choose multiple activities in each Play session.

And if you want to spend more time with multiple characters, you can choose to throw parties and increase your friendship levels that way. I thought that was a really nice touch that further enhances the socialization in Sandrock.

And speaking of parties, they made an effort to differentiate Sandrock’s festivals from those of other life simulation games. Crop, livestock, and cooking contests are more traditional events that I still enjoy, but it was nice to have a change of pace here with dancing contests, Ghost Hunting in the fall, the Running of the Bulls Yakmels, and more.

I just think that they did a really good job of writing fun, likable characters and establishing a real sense of community and camaraderie in Sandrock. There are a lot of characters, but they still managed to give each of them a distinct personality and background. Precocious Jasmine, rambling Cooper, and awkward Unsuur all ended up endearing themselves to me when I didn’t expect it.

I got a lot of laughs out of some of the dialogue – the running jokes and subtle pop culture references were silly yet entertaining. Although the writers had a lot of characters to manage, there wasn’t an excessive amount of repeated lines (that I remember). I came to love Sandrock and the people who lived there because of the way they made everyone’s personality shine.

Dating in the Desert

As a result, I felt spoiled for choice when it came to the 21 (!!!) love interests, with 12 bachelors and 9 bachelorettes. You can date any of them regardless of gender, and it’s possible to date multiple people at once. (Apparently you’ll lose points with love interests if they catch you on dates with someone else, and breakups are possible due to cheating?)

I will say that taking your favored marriage candidate(s) on dates felt a little boring in terms of romance, as you do the same activities as you would when you have a platonic hangout session. However, they all have friendship missions that allow you to get to know them some more, as well as a few romance missions.

Naturally, I was most interested in the characters who are harder to romance and/or who become available later on. But with a lot of effort and patience, I dated and married the character I ended up liking more. They happened to be one of the few characters who already have a kid prior to marrying them, which is fabulous. It’s much more realistic to have varied family models, so I liked that they included a divorcée with a child and another love interest with “found family.”

There are additional features that round out the marriage and family life. For one thing, your spouse actually does complete some tasks for you. They’ll make you up to 5 dishes a day, and you can ask them to do specific things on your property. The game is also inclusive in that gay couples can adopt kids, and straight couples can choose between pregnancy and adoption!

Sandy Struggles

So I’ve established that I think the citizens of Sandrock are wonderful. Well, sadly the town must face a series of crises in the main storyline before they can see the possibility of a happy ending. Sandstorms often damage the town’s facilities. They also have to import water due to the shortages, and there aren’t many natural resources around.

To make matters worse, the Geegler lizard people plague Sandrock with attacks on the town’s infrastructure. But wait – there’s more! Human bandits come along and make the situation even worse, and perhaps more trouble is on the horizon…

Sandrock does have a Civil Corps branch, but it lacks manpower and experience. It’s up to you to not only rebuild facilities after disaster strikes, but also go after those responsible for the damage. Thankfully, we get to choose from a variety of melee and ranged weapons, and we can equip better equipment but choose to display the prettier clothes on our character at the same time. ✨

Hostile creatures patrol most areas surrounding Sandrock, but for plot purposes you’ll have to enter dungeons. For the most part the dungeons weren’t too bad; there were maybe 2 bosses who gave me any trouble. I really disliked the platformer elements in the dungeon involving a goat (I won’t say more to avoid spoilers). Everything else felt manageable.

I was quite pleased with the game overall; however, it’s not completely without problems. While not game-breaking by any means, the occasional glitch pops up here and there. I experienced the following issues:

• Sometimes my house and workstations outside would vanish and I’d have to go inside another building and exit again for them to reappear.
• Sudden inability to move, unable to save and then reload, so I had to just reload and lose some progress to fix it.
• Unable to see animal waste in pen and have to move around until I see the word “gather” to remove it.
• Memory low message

Despite some glitches, it’s still fairly stable overall, with relatively short loading times. My only other complaint would be that the game doesn’t mention or explain certain features very well sometimes. On the flip side, they included a few things that made the game more enjoyable and convenient:

• Can change time flow settings to make days longer if you want
• Set custom reminders on calendar
• Quest & Event Tracker on map
• Fast travel

Final Thoughts

Aside from minimal technical issues and a lack of clarity on some features, I thought My Time at Sandrock was well worth the wait. It improves and expands on features that aren’t as comprehensive in similar games that came before it.

It was just very satisfying to solve Sandrock’s problems and see the progression of the town’s growth – plus that of its residents – across my 155+ hour (!!!) playtime. The animated cutscenes and voice acting help tell the touching story of a community that comes together in times of crisis.

There’s so much to see and do in this game. I usually finish the content in life sims in the first year or so, but even with the setting that made my days as long as possible turned on it took me a full 2 years to get through the main story.

The developer recently released a new update on Switch, and they apparently intend to add new content throughout 2024, including cross-platform compatibility for multiplayer mode! I think that My Time at Sandrock is a “sand-tastic” experience that’s well worth the price.

8.5/10