Welcome to Sandrock. You have arrived to make a living in a desert community as the primary builder. If you’ve ever played My Time in Portia, you will feel very comfortable with how everything works. You are given a workshop as your primary residence, where you will be able to create machines and items to help you through the many quests given by the townspeople. As you upgrade your workshop and acquire more blueprints, you will be able to access new areas for even more opportunities. Being in a desert, the town is extremely low on water and resources. There is a bandit causing mischief, leading the town into despair. Your main goal will be to find a way to solve the water issue as well as deal with the bandit. As you forge relationships with each member of the community, you will learn about them and gain reputation points. Once you have gotten someone high enough, you will gain bonuses or random items. This is very much an RPG-based game, where you gain experience and level up perks to help you in your progress. Besides just building and gathering resources, you will also be equipped with weapons and have to fight enemies. This will require you to get strong enough to be able to handle later content in the game. There is a heavy emphasis on time management. Not only do you have stamina to worry about, but also must do what you can within a day before you go to bed. Will you be able to keep the town functioning and give the town the solution it needs to stay at peace?

Here’s what I liked:

Easy to Play for Hours — It can’t be stressed just how much there is to do in Sandrock. You may often feel the burden of wanting to complete main quests, and side quests, gather resources, do commissions, and build your relationship up with the community. There are also random events based on what day of it is in the year (think holidays). I have personally played over 200 hours in the game, and quests are still popping up. This is around a hundred hours after me thinking I had completed the game, based on the climax of the storyline. At times it can really feel like a grind that never ends, but you find yourself still enjoying the journey. You can easily spend hours a a time without realizing how much time has passed in the real world. I had chosen to go through the game without doing much customizing, because I didn’t feel like I had much time to get into it (some quests are timed). However, if you love building your dream workshop area complete with farm animals, gardens, a place to fish, and building all of your own furniture, then you will likely spend even more time than I have. You simply cannot run out of things to do, at least I haven’t gotten to that point yet.

Bonding Time— With so much to do, it’s not to be forgotten the friendships you forge with the rest of the town. Talking to people, giving them gifts, sparring, playing games, everything is about building up your trust and relationships. As you bond with them, you will gain bonuses. You can even befriend animals and they will become your pets. You get to choose who you focus on, and there are plenty of people who are interesting and unique. It can be fun finding out what their favorite gifts are, through trial and error or by having a good guess based on what you think they like. There is a tab in the menu that you can look at that shows the status of each relationship. Because of your interactions with the character named Qi, he will likely become most people’s best friend. However, you can use romance options with most of the people in the town. This will let you become in a relationship with them, allowing you to take them on dates. When you then fill the status of relationship high enough, you can propose and get married. There’s even an achievement for it.

Building and Gathering — Out of all the things you can do in the game, my favorite is getting a new blueprint and having to create the machine or object. You place the blueprint down and can see what resources you need to be able to finish the product. Missing some bronze screws? Go and use the appropriate machine to start creating them. Don’t have the required materials? Go mining or gathering in the appropriate zone. It’s a great sense of accomplishment to build things for the town and see them be put to use. They were by far my favorite types of missions. Your main way to level up your workshop and gain money is also through building and farming. There is a commissions board with a bunch of requests of things from the people in town. Sometimes they can be simple, like a few wood planks. But other times they can be a full machine. Pick and choose what ones are easy or if you’d like to take no the challenge for better rewards. You are ranked in the commissions guild based on how many points you’ve made by doing these, and you will get rewarded every month and then a grand prize at the end of the year. It’s fun to be in first place.

My Time as a Series — You can jump into this game even if you haven’t played the other “My Time in” game. If you have played the previous title and thoroughly enjoyed it, then you will be pleased to know it’s a better version of the game that keeps much of the same elements in place, but also adds on to them. There is much more to do and the game takes substantially more time to fully complete. They have also included much more voice over dialogue and plenty of areas to explore. The game even mentions the other town, called Portia, and you have a quest to connect them as a trading town so that they can send you water. Because the environments are very different between these games, you would guess that maybe if another My Time game was made, it would be in a town surrounded by snow.

Just the Right Amount of Action — While fighting enemies isn’t happening every day, when it does happen, they are typically long winded fights through several enemies. This makes it important to upgrade your weapons and actually place furniture and paintings (for stat bonuses) around your workshop. You will gain fighting experience and be able to upgrade your perks in the menu to do even better damage. Besides just melee weapons, you can use guns and throw bombs at your foes. My favorite weapon is a sword that launches a slashing energy projectile at enemies. I haven’t made many weapons, but I’m sure there are a handful to create based on what weapon type is your favorite.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

Item Management — With so many different items and resources to manage, you will find yourself building an army of storage boxes. Luckily, you can quickly manage the items into the box inventories with a click of a button, adding in items of the same type automatically. You also do not need any of these resources in your inventory to use them when a blueprint needs the item, or when a person in the town requires a specific item for a quest. However, you cannot gift an item from these boxes. The worst part is artifacts. If you played Portia, you may remember hating obtaining these items, knowing you’d need to store them until you had the full set of pieces to place into the restoration machine. These items do not stack like other items, and instead take up a huge portion of your storage because you do not have all of the pieces (and there is quite a lot). When you are in some ruins looking for resources, and you have no more room in your bag, it does not automatically get sent to your storage. You must either abandon some items or purchase more space. This can get very expensive, especially early on when you aren’t making much money. I did not enjoy artifacts in the previous title, and was not excited to find them included in the predecessor.

Sandstorms — Sometimes when you wake up, there will be a sandstorm brewing outside. This makes sense, but I don’t believe it was handled well as an event. The first time it happens, you have a quest to wear gear that protects your face from the sand. Every storm since, I ran around doing my daily quests without one. It just makes it hard to see for the most part. There is an annoying message that tells you things have blown away and to follow the direction of the wind to find them. I am still not sure if they were just bonus items or if my own things were flying off of my machines at my workshop. Luckily, you do build a sand-wall at some point to help protect your shop. However, it does not automatically go up when a storm hits. You wake up and have to go press a button to activate it. Typically there is already some machines buried in sand and you must clean the sand off with a duster. This may be a minor annoyance, but still one I shook my head at every time it happened. Can’t be hiding the firework show!

Wrap-up

Without just playing it yourself, it is hard to grasp all of the options that are available in this game. It’s even weird to mention a lot of them because some are such small pieces of the game, yet are really well done. You have an arcade in the town, and you can build mini-games to play, for example. There are events like a Halloween themed one with hide-and-seek. If you like dancing they have that too. How about a blimp that drops random gifts and everyone tries to snag them first. There is so much going that you may feel almost stressed. There are a handful of side quests that are time-based, but everything else you can kind of do on your own. Just let the years pass and take your time if you’d really like. I just wanted to rush through it because my time in Sandrock was taking too long and I have other things to do. I say that after spending 8 full days playing it. If you choose to pick this title up, please remember to feed your cat if you have one. Your time starts to vanish as soon as you hit “new game”.

Score: Highly Recommended

My Time in Sandrock was published by PM Studios, Inc and developed by Pathea Games on Xbox One. It was released on November 2, 2023, for $39.99. A copy was provided for review purposes.