Recent reviews by Taiyaki11

This game is an amazing RPG. I'll start with prefacing that the beginning is very story loaded and slow to start, the "past" areas that you explore are a bit annoying with the camera angle but not the end of the world. aside from those two issues I don't have much in the way of complaints

It's kind of in the same field as Rune Factory meshing day to day life activities into an RPG, with a healthy dose of animal crossing NH-esque island building in it. you have the "past" which has areas that function more like a traditional RPG zone based map, the "Open world" zone to explore, and the "present" where you build your island and fill it with villagers that also journey alongside you on your adventures helping you fight, gather, and craft. The game gives you a lot of freedom to tackle it however you want, if you choose to level all your lives together they feed into each other beautifully, gathering the materials yourself to craft gear to allow you to fight, gather, and craft better, etc. However if thats overwhelming for you you can absolutely focus on just a couple lives or so, or even just go full combat and progress off of loot drops and store bought items like a typical RPG.

There is multiplayer, you cannot progress story in it, but people can visit each other's islands, explore regions together, dungeoning, etc. If there's mobs or gathering nodes giving you trouble bring a friend or 3!

I feel tricked. Bought after playing the demo, COMPLETELY different experience. I mean that as literally as possible, the demo isn't a snippet of the actual game, it's a complete standalone experience that so far the actual game isn't living up to at all. Most infuriating of it, the movement speed. why is the movement in the actual game like HALF the movement speed of the actual game? the run speed in the game is the walking speed of the demo, not even joking. Combine with a bunch of time wasting hallway walking sections, obnoxiously long pauses between animations, waiting for dailogue boxes to actually start up, etc the whole experience is exceptionally painful.

Be warned, do not treat the demo like an actual reflection of the game and do not get it at it's full $40 price, the devs are crazy to think this game is worth that much, even if this game was brand new let alone now being two and a half years old

Definitely a unique take that I've been dying for someone to do for awhile now. You explore, adventure, and go questing around the open map and return home with the spoils to sell off in your store. It's fairly impressive how open the design is and how much freedom you have. You can engage with most all the systems as much or as little as you want. Want to run around the world mining/logging/fishing/farming/etc your own raw materials and craft items to sell in your shop? You can do that. Want to forgo the usual survival crafting approach and just source all your merchandise by grabbing everything not nailed down you find in places like bandit outposts while adventuring around the world? You can do that (hell with the equipment you can loot you can probably play most the game without engaging in crafting almost ever and looting all your equipment if you really wanted to). That neighbor have a really sexy looking fridge that you just gotta have in your own house? Providing your lockpicking is high enough and/or you're skilled enough, yes you can absolutely do that too.

Running your shop is entertaining in and of itself as well. build the shop from the ground up making the layout however you wish. Make it look how you like with a plethora of wallpapers, furniture, decorations, etc. Once it's build and you open it up you run around keeping the place clean, restocking the displays, and determining the price of items at checkout squeezing in a bit more money above base sell price. If you so desire you can eventually completely automate the process by hiring and training staff to run the shop for you.

All the money you make goes into leveling up your character's Health,damage, and stamina when you level up and gain skill points, your crafting research tree, your shop's perks, and your employees' training. Pretty much all your progression will revolve around money. This honestly still feels like I'm just scratching the surface, this is still leaving out stuff such as there's a cosmetic layer system for armor/clothing, the world loves having hidden little secrets and areas, etc. But for the sake of brevity we'll leave it at that. Negative-wise the main sticklers for me is first off controller support is...abyssmal at the moment, seems like it's a work in progress so I'm sure it'll improve but something to keep an eye out for atm if you're a controller player. Second is the game does have a bit of jank to it, not terrible but it is there. While combat is fun and engaging with trying to perfect block and such for example, not really having a lock on or anything makes flying past enemies trying to hit them a common occurrence. Lastly it seems if you play fairly long sessions you tend to accrue bugs and performance issues until you at least soft reset by going out to the main menue and back in to refresh the session. Aside from that, that's all the main issues of the current version of the game I can think of, it's a gem of a game and one I plan to be playing for a long time

There is just no excuse for the performance of a several year game running on hardware that wasn't even *out* when the game released being this bad. brand new computer with a rtx 40 series and 7000 series 9 ryzen and yet i can't even get it to stay a stable 30 fps? and oh god the audio stuttering, this is genuinely the only game I've *ever* had do *that*. I genuinely can't understand where the glowing praise is coming from and why there is no mention of the unoptimized mess this game is, all I can say is I am VERY glad it was on sale over %90 off for like $2 when I got it....I'm starting to see WHY it gets sales that low though

Highly slept on game honestly. Take lethal company but add some more environment variety, progression, and the ability to save what you've earned and you got this game. I hesitate to say it's *better* than lethal company, both have their strong points over the other, but if you love lethal company you'll more than likely love sketchy's as well.

Easily the most unique feature is getting to the point where you stay overnight on site, chancing upon more valuable loot but dealing with your ship leaving you for the night and far more dangerous and scary creatures going bump in the night. Another merit of staying overnight is keeping the world from refreshing so you can try and push through the higher security locked areas of the map.

This review is 99% loaded in.

Edit: so ya, this issue is *still* a thing. still randomly get stuck at 99% loading in until somebody rolls the server way back losing everyone god knows how much progress because otherwise people literally cannot log into the server. Not even going to get into how servers decide they want to dry heave anytime more than two people are on a server and start actively doing stuff in it, contracts randomly rescind themselves within a single ingame day sometimes despite starting that very day and literally being impossible to finish, there's a farm ball under a bridge that's unattainable in hutan pantai because the crouching hitbox doesn't work, the list goes on issues big and small. This game is one hell of a joke coming off of 19, even FS 19 at launch wasn't half this bad. Once that first couple days of server outage was over 19 was pretty much fine, it's been half a month now and this game is still acting like garbage.

worth the price, $5. Also completely extra, this was only made because people literally asked for it this was not "cut" from the base game lol

Fun little game to play with friends. You run around a haunted randomized school with several different types of ghosts roaming with their own quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. Definitely a game more balanced toward a group. It can be done solo but much more versatility with a team where someone can run distraction or the fact perks are shared so for every extra person you have that's an extra perk as well. they just recently added a new level with new ghost types so interested to see if content continues to be added

Whenever they actually release any of the supposed content they've been working on for...literal years now, maybe it'll change. but otherwise there's no sign of this progressing through any stage of early access, it's been "soon"(tm) for years now, be very aware of that

Sandrock is absolutely addicting. The simplest comparison many hear is to Stardew, which is true but kind of different. Your main activity boils down to crafting and exploring the world instead of farming (though farming IS in the game, along with animals, pets, mounts~) and single player is a fairly story heavy based mode with a LOT of quests and subquests. romances in this are far superior to the likes of Stardew in my opinion, where you can actually take the romance options on various dates and activities. Tons of mini-games and festivals, combat dungeons to go through, you name it. For those who, like me, enjoyed the idea of Portia but couldn't really get into it, Sandrock as a *vast* amount of polish that puts it leads above Portia. Between the vast amount of varied content and activities, watching the town and characters grow and develop, and an actually entertaining (if a bit too silly at times personally) story, you'll be hard pressed not to get completely sucked in and obsessed with Sandrock.

The biggest elephant in the room for people is how separate the singleplayer and multiplayer modes are, and I'll probably be the rare voice in that I actually *enjoy* this distinction. despite having played through the story (mostly, there is a LOT of dang content here seriously) I'm not any more bored for it playing multiplayer with my friends because of how fresh and different it feels. I'd akin singleplayer toward rune factory whereas multiplayer is more stardew, while single player follows a narrative heavy story, where many things are locked behind narrative events; multiplayer is a free form mode where you do whatever you want and choose the direction you want to go. The multiplayer town starts in a VERY barebones state (no general store, no train, passageways blocked off, etc) so even having played the story it was a completely new experience building the town practically from the ground up with friends and dungeons being in different states. Many people complain they can't experience the singleplayer story in multiplayer but honestly...that type of gameplay just would NOT translate well into multiplayer like people seem to think it would. with how many story conversations and cutscenes there constantly are any multiplayer session would pretty much be everyone constantly being ripped away from whatever they're trying to do to be pulled into watching the story progress..... or miss half the story because they don't get to see the cutcenes, there's just no way it would go well. You can't have seperate story progression in the same session either because the town itself is affected by the story. I honestly feel the way they went about it was the best way, and honestly gave us all the more content for it as a bonus.

If i were to scrounge up some negative points off the top of my head, my first priority would be the multiplayer save system. I love that like grounded everyone shares the file and can log on without the "host" at any time, but we seriously need to be able to join other people's towns without losing all our progress in the original town. people with more then a 3 friend circle or want to jump in some rando's world or help someone else out would have to sacrifice virtually all their progress to do so.
The cutscenes could use just a bit of touch up at the end, they can end a bit too abruptly and awkwardly.
The combat could use some more depth for sure. It's not *bad* but it's not anything to write home about either.
A few of the romance options basically make you wait til you finish dang near the whole story before you can finally engage in that side of the game. Narratively I get it for some cases but it doesn't make it any less frustrating for a story that takes many, *many* hours to get through.
Last but not least... sand sledding.... I want to love it but dear god.... Somebody fix the handling please, there's nothing fun about something thats as unresponsive as a boulder.