Review: SunnySide is ambitious but underwhelming

Sunny Side Falling into the same old trap is a game that isn’t really ready for most players at this point. This ambitious farming simulation and role-playing game packs an incredible amount of depth and systems, but every aspect from the user interface to the gameplay falls short of its promise.

If you have played games like Stardew Valley or Tale of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Townyou will realize the motivation for the plot. You move from a big city in Japan to a small town in the countryside to start over. Your highly customizable player character inherits an extremely empty plot of land to farm and build to your liking.

ARRIVE by SunnySide To its credit, this game is almost free when it comes to this genre. You can actually make your character look like you or anyone you want thanks to the plethora of aspects to edit, from weight, facial features, hair to even gender identity. However, the 3D graphics look a bit bland, especially when it comes to character models. This is a shame because the realistic 2D character portraits look fantastic. That said, the welcome depth of customization does help offset some of that. After all, your farm is a blank canvas for you to call your own. You can build every inch of your farm and home from a humble shack to a growing mansion. In this way, the game feels like a survival crafting experience, but this is only a small part of the experience SunnySide must provide.

There is also a whole farming aspect where players plant seeds, water them and sell them to earn money to unlock more materials, buildings, gifts and upgrades. If that’s not enough, there’s even simple turn-based RPG combat. However, it even resembles a similar combat system in other games such as Stardew Valley. You can go dozens of hours without really getting into linear dungeons and simple battles. There’s very little depth to it beyond some commands and a deck-like system of collecting different Ofuda for effects. Ofuda collection starts off fun, but the relatively easy difficulty makes it feel as unnecessary as possible. I wish the turn-based combat was more prominent in the overall flow of the game.

All these different aspects are packed into a smartphone-based interface that feels intuitive. However, it is by SunnySide That ambition was also its downfall. While I was grateful for the variety of activities, none of them felt fulfilling or worthwhile. A big part of this comes from how poorly things work. This game is sometimes a challenge to play due to it being mostly inactive, especially in outdoor, open-world areas. However, it even takes time to load and runs at breakneck speed indoors. This may be because I spent most of my time on Steam Deck, which has very high frame rates. To make matters worse, frequent pop-ups and slow loading make matters worse.

To give it a fair shake, I did warm up SunnySide on a more powerful gaming PC. Unfortunately, it’s not much better there than on the Steam Deck. It runs a little smoother in some areas, but there are still major performance and visual hiccups. This game is without a doubt some of the worst optimization I’ve seen in a while.

Sadly, the problems don’t end there. While the game does have controller support, it doesn’t work that well. The motion controls are generally fine and using tools seems acceptable, but the interface is pretty cluttered. Most menus use the cursor to navigate the menu, inventory, and even the phone. It’s slow and inaccurate, causing me to waste more time in the menu than I should have. This is even worse when you consider that most things are in the phone menu, like messages and even the world map.

However, there is one element that may never be fixed, and that is the romance system. There is 25 romantic characters That sounds impressive, but there are some serious problems with dating in the game. Each character has a gender expression scale that they prefer to date. This scale is what players use during character creation to define their identity. Basically, you have a 10 for masculine, a 10 for feminine, and non-binary right in the middle. You can choose your gender identity anywhere on the spectrum, which is pretty neat. There are a few problems with this system, though, and it’s mostly in the implementation.

For example, loving Hanako but not being feminine? Sorry, but you’re out of luck. I think the idea of ​​focusing on this issue isn’t inherently bad; After all, other farming sim game series lock romance behind gender in the past. The problem is that you have to research each character in advance to know their preferences, and there’s no way to change your gender identity at this time once you’ve left the character creator. This actually seems ironically counterintuitive, since gender identity can be fluid, and offering a way to change your gender identity in-game would allow players to experiment.

It’s a shame, because the most fun I had with this game was talking and hanging out with the characters. You could say Sunny SideThe developer has noted from Figure series of stories. Each character has different friendship levels where you can learn more about them. Some of the stories are quite moving, really funny and quite diverse.

Overall, the writing is actually pretty great. It’s too bad there’s so much frustration with the controls, performance, and UI most of the time to make that slim profit. Ultimately, this makes Sunny Side thumbnail image of the “wait and see” early access title. It simply does too much from survival mechanics to building, RPG combat to farming and relationships.

While there’s a lot to see here, there’s rarely anything that works so well as to make the experience worthwhile. I believe there is a solid farming simulation RPG in the works SunnySidebut it may take time and many updates to reach that potential. For now, I wouldn’t recommend checking it out unless you’re pretty accepting of the complaints.

Sunny Side Now available on PC via Steam.

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