My Time at Sandrock Review | Charming Oasis

Even after a surface-level search, it’s clear to me that My Time at Portia is a fan favorite for many life sim aficionados. Fully released in 2019, the game has cultivated a community that cares about both the vast world and its colorful characters. I am unfortunately not one of the 3 million people who have spent time with the My Time series from developer Pathea, but I have always admired it from afar as a fan of relaxing life sims. That is until recently. After getting ACL reconstruction surgery, I spent the last two weeks exploring the Wild West-themed city of Sandrock. I am not done with my adventure in this small desert town just yet but after over 30 hours, I can confidently say that the game has its hook in me.

In My Time at Sandrock, you play as a builder of your creation who moves into town to fill the position after the last builder’s retirement. It’s only fair then, to start this review talking about character creation. Characters in My Time games look like they’re distantly related to Nintendo’s Miis, which is to say that they come with a decent amount of customization options (like nose depth and chin height), but due to their own artistic limitations, your creations can’t always reach the image you might have in your head. As someone who has a shaven head and a beard, I couldn’t really recreate myself in the game as I often try to. (The facial hair options here being the obvious point of contention.) That being said, I still mostly appreciate the options available here and I can’t really fault the game for having an aesthetic.

Once you make your builder, you will be set loose on the town, partly being guided by in-game tutorials and partly just figuring things out. Being a roughly 50-hour game, My Time at Sandrock takes its time rolling out new mechanics and even after a dozen hours in, I found myself still discovering new things to do and new ways to streamline my output. If you grow wide-eyed at the playtime of the game, you must be new to the life sim genre so let me run you through the basics. As the newly appointed builder, you are a new face in a small town where everyone knows everyone else. The people are (mostly) hardworking and despite their flaws, they can be endearing. As you carry out your work, you will get to know them better, deciding for yourself who you want to avoid, who you want to become acquaintances with, and who you might even want to get involved with romantically.

Because of the very nature of the genre, writing and characters are crucial to any life sim. It’s a good thing then that My Time at Sandrock is quite charming. Characters feel distinct in their writing and their voice work goes a long way in bringing them to life. I have enjoyed some genuine laughs and smiles while playing the game and that’s a testament to the writing on display. A lot of that comes from being self-aware but Sandrock dances the line well, never taking me out of the experience for an ill-timed joke. For a genre where the story is so often ignored, I was also surprised at the expansive My Time at Sandrock storyline. It’s not perfect but it is engaging. It should be noted that not all characters and moments are voice-acted but all the main story missions along with most of the side plots are. It was odd at first getting used to hearing characters narrate lines for the first few hours and then having to read them instead (so much so that I thought it was a bug at first) and some people might prefer no voice acting at all in that regard, but most of the performances are great and it did a lot to give characters a distinct personality.

Perhaps even more impressive in terms of character writing are the characters that you don’t see at all. Some mornings, you will find letters in the mailbox from your mother or childhood best friend and these are some of the best examples of character work in the game. They feel organic and genuine in ways that I felt added to their believability. It also builds out a backstory prior to your appearance in the opening cut scene and it’s effective in giving depth to your own character. To add to that, there is also a reply feature that lets you select from a few pre-written options to write back, giving you control over what sort of response you get back.

As for the gameplay loop, you wake up at 7 in the morning and until midnight, you are free to do as you please, be it working commissions, spending time with other characters, or mining by your lonesome. (I’ll touch more on that in a bit.) I find the gameplay of My Time at Sandrock to be a double-edged sword because while, on one hand, it really understands the addictive checklist nature of life sims very well, on the other, it doesn’t really innovate on the formula too much. In all honesty, this wasn’t a problem for me as I almost immediately reverted back to my Stardew Valley mindset of running through a day’s tasks and taking stock of inventory while planning out the next in my head. This is part of what makes it so easy to lose time in My Time at Sandrock (and other good games in the genre) because it’s so easy to say “just one more day” while playing.

As I’ve suggested in the last paragraph, just because you’re a builder in Sandrock, doesn’t mean that all you’ll be doing is building in Sandrock. There are a variety of activities to keep your interest that all roll into the job. For mining enthusiasts, you can head down to the abandoned ruins to do some digging with your pickhammer. For foragers and hunters, there are a few different wild plants and animals to find. If you like action, there are combat areas to explore. For the adventurers, there are lots of secrets to uncover both in the town and down below. And for farmers, there are also farming and livestock management mechanics as well. While you can nosedive into any of those game systems specifically, the result of all of them together is a game that doesn’t ever get boring. If you find yourself getting tired of something, just do something else.

This variety is accentuated in the quests and events. The end of Summer sees the town celebrating the Day of Memories and part of the event is to play hide and seek with some of the town being ghosts and the others being hunters. These sorts of timed events briefly add a new system to the game that totally deviates from the regular gameplay loop and it’s a fun way to break up the pace. Furthermore, as you develop relationships, there are special side quests that will task you with unique experiences of their own. One storyline had me going on a literal picnic in the park while another had me tracking down a wild animal only ominously referred to as “it.” These aren’t all thrown at you at once and it’s your choice if you want to engage with them at all, and I appreciated the freedom of selection. Building relations with characters and, consequently, learning more about them and the world they inhabit was a real highlight of My Time at Sandrock. To that end, there’s also a dating mechanic that is unlocked after reaching a certain friendship level with your choice of nearly two dozen romanceable characters and the system works well from my limited use.

Everything I said about the freedom of gameplay selection also goes the other way too. If you don’t like a mechanic, you can minimize your time with it or just avoid it altogether. For example, the game has a building mechanic that lets you customize your house. This didn’t really click with me so I didn’t do it. Instead, my form of self-expression was in the way I dressed my character and I like that the game is cool with that. (Special mention to the fact that look and equipment can be changed individually so you can make your character look how you want without sacrificing stats.) To reflect that, there are also four distinct skill trees that let you upgrade stats. You are awarded points to use in one of the trees based on how much you do a corresponding activity. Using myself as another example, I didn’t really engage in fighting too much and this meant that while my social and mining-related skill trees were spruced up, the one pertaining to combat remained barren.

Not to harp on the runtime, but while it can be daunting, My Time at Sandrock is meant to be a relaxing game and there are a number of features and options to help with that. The biggest one is the ability to click down on the left stick to find out where to get any item you need. If you are at a worktable and see you need three different items to craft something, you can go and see where you can purchase or procure each item individually. This helps remove a lot of the guessing work and lets you get right to the action. Additionally, for players who think the in-game day goes by too fast (or too slow), you can go to the settings and change the game speed to better suit your liking. Combat (even in the boss fights) is easy, penalties for not completing commissions are forgiving, and mechanics aren’t info dumped in the opening. Whether you want a meaty game to unwind with after work or a new game to grind in while listening to your favorite podcast, My Time at Sandrock is a worthy contender.

If you’re like me and you haven’t played My Time at Portia, you will be happy to know that you don’t have to have played the prior title to enjoy this one. There are certainly references that will have a greater payoff to those familiar with the events and characters in Portia, but these are mostly said in passing and don’t take away from the experience. The one noticeable difference in the experience of playing Sandrock versus other life-sims is that the world of the My Time games feels fleshed out with various locations and events being frequently mentioned. It did take me a few hours to really understand how everything worked and it can be a bit overwhelming for new players to be thrown into the frenzy of figuring out where to go for specific items and what machine gets you what you want but once it clicks, it’s smooth sailing. Plus it’s really rewarding to go from the fledgling builder that’s barely scraping by at the start of the game to the loaded machine that can give out loans of 2000 Gols to their friend.

Now you might read everything I’ve written so far and think that My Time at Sandrock is flawless but, sadly, it is held back by some issues. This makes this next section the most important for players who are on the fence about the game. I played most of the game on the Xbox Series X with graphics set to prioritize performance. (I did switch to quality a few times but I found performance to be the better of the two options.) Even on Xbox’s most powerful system, the game has technical hiccups. Most of this is pop-in with entire buildings taking a second or two to load in after you’re already in the game. The biggest culprit here is the train station and almost every time I walked out of the Commerce Guild, I would see a gap in the landscape before seeing the station blip back into existence. There are some other minor issues too like frame drops in action-heavy cutscenes, but the most annoying for me was the control remapping. By default, the game has A set to jump and Y to interact but having recently come off Starfield, I was pleased to know that you can remap the buttons around. Unfortunately, these controls reset every time you close the game and though it only took me a few seconds to change it every time, it was inconvenient. Also, I’m not sure if this was something on my end or not but Quick Resume did not work on the game. Turning off the system always made me restart from the last save file.

Your mileage with My Time at Sandrock will really depend on how big all those issues are for you. For me, I found the charm of the game to far outweigh the minor technical glitches but it’s also understandable if you do not. If it’s any vote of confidence, in the roughly two weeks that I’ve been playing the game leading up to release, there have already been updates. My points are also specifically about the console edition of the game and I advise PC players to seek out PC reviews as I would hope the game’s more reliably stable there having spent quite a bit of time in Early Access on Steam prior to the release. That being said, I know that Nintendo Switch has a big life-sim fanbase and the performance issues I experienced on the Series X paint a dull picture for fans looking for on-the-go building.

To wrap it up, My Time at Sandrock is a charming life sim with some quirks. I mentioned the game’s charm earlier and that’s really the one word my notes kept coming back to for this game. It’s really charming. Now I admit that that charm, which I describe as a blend of the Fallout games and a Hallmark movie, is not for everyone but it is unapologetically itself. If you can work past the mostly minor technical problems, you will find a town of endearing characters to get lost in. As I said at the top, I am over 30 hours in and this is a game I will keep chipping away at throughout the rest of the year. It’s loaded with content and mechanics that prevent the game from ever getting too repetitive and, though I didn’t do it myself, co-op play is a great addition to the package. For the weary, I would say wait for a few updates and a sale, but for fans of the genre, this is a great new entry that I definitely recommend. My Time at Sandrock is out tomorrow, November 2, for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A review code was provided by the publisher.