My Time At Sandrock Early Access Review – First Look & Hopes for Improvements

I am a big fan of peaceful “life sim” games that let me build up my farm or home base, explore a bit, meet some friendly NPCs and give me satisfying jobs to do like farming or crafting. Stardew Valley remains an all-time favorite of mine even after trying several of the games that inspired it or were inspired by it. 

My Time at Portia and its sequel My Time at Sandrock are not farming games, but mix the formula up by focusing on craftsmanship and assembling large construction parts, which works really well with the otherwise familiar genre staples like gathering, mining, resource management, home base improvements and relationship development. 

I reviewed My Time at Portia on The Mane Quest back in 2019 and liked it a lot, even though the horse features and looks were not particularly exciting by themselves. 

When the crowdfunding campaign for the sequel My Time at Sandrock launched in early 2021, I knew I had to try and get on board early, with the hopes of leaving valuable horse-related feedback with the game still in development for a game I was surely going to enjoy anyway. With the Early Access release in late May 2022, it was obviously time to redeem my backer key and give this a try.

Welcome to Sandrock

My Time at Sandrock starts with your arrival at the titular town of Sandrock as one of two new Builders. You quickly get acquainted with the other local craftspeople including the dubiously competent guild master Yan, the Civil Corps leader named Justice and your friend and rival Mi-an. 

By gathering resources and crafting new tools and machinery, you ramp up your workshop’s production capacity in order to do commissions for specific items and assemble large building parts for main missions. 

The formula of assembling large items from laboriously gathered and refined resources works as splendidly as it did in Portia. I blasted through most of the available quests in a matter of days – admittedly partly because I was sick and couldn’t do much but sit around gaming, but also because the game’s content and core mechanics are just really engaging and satisfying. 

Before too long, rancher’s daughter Elsie invited my player character to learn about horses and riding, giving me a chance to look at the game’s mounts in motion. 

Although bandits and mutant lizards provide some conflict, the overall mood of the game is pretty wholesome.

Gathering and refining resources remains a core activity in Sandrock.

Bendy Legs, Wonky Shapes

At first glance, I definitely like the Sandrock horses more than the ones in Portia: their once spindly legs now have a bit of weight to them, the whole animal looks significantly bigger and weightier next to the player character and the shape seems a bit more proportional. 

That being said, there remain a few stylistic choices that I can’t really get behind, such as the perpetually annoyed-looking eyes and the wonky head shape. Where the human NPCs have all lost most of their stylistic weirdness compared to the first game – several of them look good enough that I’m actually going to use the romance features this time around – the horses retain some of those weirdly unappealing qualities. 

I can still see myself getting attached to the Sandrock steeds though: their wonky shape doesn’t make them unlovable, I just find the artistic choices a bit odd. 

In motion, the horses are hit or miss, depending on what ground you move across: they unfortunately suffer from a very similar setup of Inverse Kinematics as Torrent in Elden Ring, which I’ve written about at length here. When moving upwards or over rocky terrain, this results in a spidery climb on bent legs that just looks off-putting. It’s a shame, because the actual animations for walk, trot and gallop are perfectly fine on even ground: the footfalls have a decent weight to them, with all joints moving as they should, which we all know isn’t something I take for granted in horse animation. 

I’m certain setting up a quadruped’s IK for different terrains isn’t an easy topic, but there has to be a better solution than having horses constantly squat. I should really look into this with my animator friends some time. 

Moving at a walk looks alright, but you can only do it by carefully pressing the joystick a tiny bit.

The spider-climb over rocky ground reminds a lot of Torrent.

The player character’s position and motion atop the horse can’t really be called riding as much as it’s hunched-over hanging on to a handle on the saddle. That’s surely one way to get around the complications of rein-behavior and it’s not the worst I’ve seen. 

Limited Functionality

At the time of writing, you cannot yet own horses in My Time at Sandrock, only rent them from the ranch for a week at a time. The colors of available horses update from time to time, and their star rating suggests there will be differences in their ability. Developer Pathea games promises “Mount Training and Stables” in an update in Early August on their Roadmap, so there is definitely more coming. 

In its current state, the horse is primarily a speed upgrade, and a useful and welcome one at that. Although Sandrock is a perfectly walkable community, the paths between Workshop and Clinic, Scrapyard and Water Shop quickly add up. Traversing the desert town at a gallop lets you save precious time in your work day, allowing you to finish tight commissions on time or to get back home and into bed after ruin-diving without the debuff from sleeping too late. 

Although I played the game with mouse and keyboard, I had to switch to controller because there’s no way to go at a walk without the gradual input of a joystick – the same issue that annoyed me in last year’s Horse Club Adventures and Spirit. My Time at Portia had a button to toggle walking that worked on foot and on horseback, a functionality that I hope Sandrock will still add.

Horses with different coat colors are available to rent on a rotation.

In general, the riding controls feel somewhat sluggish: acceleration takes a while and once you’re at a gallop you have a significant turn radius. Accelerating, stopping, mounting and dismounting takes up significant time and space, which is not ideal because they way to use the horse in this game is to get quickly from place to place while doing your chores, rather than riding long distances at a time. 

Pathea appears to be aware of this, and a patch on June 2nd “Optimized the time of mounting/off the mount, reduced the mount's acceleration time and inertia”, but the impression persisted for me even after the hotfix. 

Controlling your mount is made more awkward by the fact that your controls are relative to the screen rather than to the horse: this is perhaps a matter of taste to some degree, but I found it highly unintuitive. It also means that you cannot move backwards. 

The only way to stop quickly is to press the dismount button – doing so from a high speed sometimes triggers a somewhat rushed-looking rearing animation. 

Hopes for Future Updates

I realize My Time at Sandrock isn’t a horse game, and the devs will have plenty of other features to work on. Still, considering that there are still horsie features currently in development – and let’s be real, because it’s fun to think about – I put together a “wish list” for a handful of changes and additional features that could really elevate the Sandrock horses to the next level. 

Yes, it’s an actual list for easier readability:

• Please let me take off my horse’s saddle when I put it away in the barn. Bonus points if that gives me some advantage, like the horse sleeps better and has bonus stamina the next day or something. 

• I’m assuming this is planned already, but please let me pet and feed my horses. Perhaps there will even be some relationship progress with the horse where you unlock more interactions as you bond with it? 

• Add functionality to whistle for the horse! I can already tell it to stay or to follow me, but I’d love to be able to tie or leave the horse somewhere and then call it to me. 

• A fast-stop button that lets me quickly halt from a fast pace without dismounting. 

• Owning several horses with different stats and different looks: maybe upgrading a stable to fit more horses? 

• Customizing the horses’ tack would be really cool: for example an option to craft different saddle pads at the Tailoring Machine and then equip those for different horses. 

• Considering that Training horses is already coming up, this may already be planned, but I’d love to be able to improve their stats, or maybe even teach them moves such as coming when I whistle or performing a sliding stop. Further training could then improve said moves by increasing the distance over which your horse listens to you, or shortening the time it takes to stop from a gallop. 

• I don’t have enough experience with animation to tell exactly what needs to change about the horses’ Inverse Kinematics setup, but it would be really great if the steeds used their forelegs more appropriately on uneven ground instead of that creepy spider walk. 

And that’s the humble version of the potential I see in a game like this for horse gameplay. Of course I could also imagine a whole skill tree for the horse where you unlock cool functionality like special moves and additional abilities, let alone more in depth features like stable customization, horse races or even breeding, but I’m going to try and limit myself to the vaguely plausible here. 

The player character already has four skill trees for different core feautres, so I can dream of one being added for riding.

The crafting menu at the Tailoring Machine allows crafting equipment – why not add tack into the mix?

You can select equipment for your avatar for stats and style, I’d love it if this were expanded to horses as well.

Other Matters

The game is definitely not yet perfect or finished in any other aspect and could profit from various improvements to the overall quality of life as well as to individual features. 

Social interactions grow a bit tedious through the use of the 1 and Esc keys as shortcuts without the option to – for example – use additional mouse buttons instead. The hazardous ruins are not particularly interesting thanks to fairly monotonous combat, seemingly endless player health and a lack of interesting loot or salvage. 

Placing new buildings and rooms is a bit of a pain.

The building upgrade menu at Construction Junction is unintuitive to use and frustratingly limited because you have to first clean up your yard before being able to place anything, but you only know how much space you need once you’ve loaded the construction game mode, which just makes the whole process feel very tedious. 

With the game only just released in Early Access, significant updates planned for the next few months and patches happening every few days, it’s entirely possible that these complaints will be outdated very soon. 

Overall, the game feels more polished and less buggy than I remember My Time at Portia being. I am impressed by how much narrative content, including fully animated and voice acted cutscenes, I’ve already seen, even though it appears that I’ve now reached the end of currently playable main quest content, after about thirty hours of playtime. 

I am putting the game to the side for now but will gladly revisit it in a few months when more content and improvements have been added. I still have an unfairly handsome and unattainable doctor to romance, after all. 

In summary: My Time at Sandrock is definitely already worth playing in its current state, but if you prefer to get the complete experience at once, it may make sense to wait a bit longer, both for more narrative content as well as for more horse features.  

With a few updates and additions, the game is for sure shaping up to be a worthy successor to Portia, and a treat for everyone on the lookout for chill and engaging crafting and life sim games who happen to have horses in them.

My Time at Sandrock is available on Steam in Early Access. Releases on other storefronts and consoles are planned in the future.