I’ve tried to get into so many life sims over the years. I liked 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Harvest Moon and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rune Factory as a teenager, but it wasn’t until 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Stardew Valley that the genre swept me off my feet. Melting away hours growing crops, f🦋lirting with cute girls, and dungeon spelunking never gets old, and even years later I still return to it for the occasional playth♏rough.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:ConcernedApe set such a high bar that finding other games in the genre to scratch a similar itch has become increasingly difficult. Unless there’s a big hook, worthwhile cast of characters, or interesting change in setting to keep me invested, I play for a little while thinking, ‘Why don’t I just go back to Stardew?’. For years, few games have come along to challenge the throne. Out of them all however, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:My Time At Sandrock has come closest.
You can be a raging homosexual in My Time at Sandrock, which also takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s possible the ⭕two points are related.
But why does Pathea’s sequel - which launched out of early access this week - deserve my attention when so many of its contemporaries have failed? I’m still not sure, but after four hours establishing my workshop and b🎃efriending the many residents of its titular town, I find myself sinking into a routine of socialising, building, dungeon crawling, and flirting with all the romantic interests. The hooks are in, and for games like this, that’s the hardest part. The comforting malaise of existing in a sꦅmall town where its inhabitants do everything they can to make ends meet is on full display here, with everything from ranch hands to tailors going about their everyday business much like you do.
While you’ll eventually 💎indulge in a spot of farming, you’re invited to this town to become a builder who completes commissions for the townspeople. Beginning with a tiny workshop, I swiftly erected a handful of workbenches and furnaces to craft all the materials I needed. It’s a constantly shifting process as you progress through the story and try to earn as much profit as possible, all while figuring out exactly how the game’s myriad systems interweave.
I had no clue what I was doing for a couple of hours, slowly finishing up tasks and figuring out where specific resources could be gathered, so I wouldn’t fall behind. It felt like I was finding my role in the wider community, until a few new friends decided I was burnt out and dragged me off to the local arcade to unwind. Sandrock feels like a real place in much the same way Pelican Town does, a beautiful desert oasis in the shadow of a post-apoca𒁃lyptic world.
It isn’t entirely peaceful however, with combat playing a larger role in Sandrock than I could have expected. It’s basically a Tales game with a life sim bolted onto the side. You’re able to level up, learn new skills, craft weapons, and duke it out with evil lizard people and deadly chickens whenever you stumble across them. They drop resources too, providing incಌentive to murder the local wildlife before they do the same to you. At first, it just felt like a more slightly robust version of combat in other games like this, but then I got my hands on a gun. After that, it was hard to resist a good blasting whenever♎ the opportunity arose.
Sandrock has a few trigger-happy law enforcement officers patrolling the town, and I found a dozen pistol bullets on the floor one evening that I never gave back. It took a few hours to be trusted with a gun of my own, and a generous amount of level grinding to take on high level enemies, but once I was ready, this charming life sim turned into a third-person shooter where you shoot first and ask questions later. The open world expands alongside the narrative too, so chances to jump atop a mount with a firearm in tow keep on coming, and knowing that pretty much everything I did would result in resources that would feed back into the core loop gives My Time At Sandrock a mor✨eish quality that many Stardew Valley imitators fail to capture.
Pathea has built on its charming yet underwhelming predecessor in every way that matters, evenꦐ if its strongest assets still pilfer liberally from better games, it has enough weird quirks and clever ideas to keep me coming back. I know there is still much more for me to see and do, such as meet my desert sweetheart and show her my growing firearm collection. I swear I only use them to murder 🧜baddies and chickens who show up on my lawn. There is just something delightfully ridiculous about flirting with a cel-shaded sweetheart one minute and waltzing up to local bandits and filling them with lead the next.
