Sunny Side falling into the age-old trap of a game not quite ready for most players to get into at this point. This ambitious farming simulation and role-playing game is packed with incredible depth and systems, but every aspect from the user interface to the gameplay undermines its promise.
If you have played games like Stardew Valley or Tale of Seasons: Friends of Mineral TownYou will realize the motivation for the story. You move from a big city in Japan to a small town in the countryside to start over. Your highly customizable player character inherits a very empty plot of land to farm and build to your liking.
ARRIVE by SunnySide credit, this game is one of the most liberating when it comes to this genre. You can really make your character look like you or anyone you want due to there being so many aspects to adjust, from weight to facial features to hair to even gender identity. However, the 3D graphics look a bit bland, especially when it comes to character models. It’s a shame, because the realistic 2D character portraits look great. However, the welcome depth of customization helps make up for that somewhat. After all, your farm is a blank canvas to call your own. You can build every inch of your farm and home from a modest tent to a growing mansion. In this way, the game feels like a survival crafting experience, but this is only a small part of what the experience entails. SunnySide must provide.
There’s also the 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 seems like an afterthought compared to similar combat systems in other games like Stardew Valley. You can play for dozens of hours without really getting lost in the linear dungeons and simple battles. There’s very little depth to this game beyond a few commands and a deck-like system for collecting different Ofuda for effects. Collecting Ofuda is fun at first, but the relatively easy difficulty ensures that it’s not as necessary as it could be. I wish turn-based combat had more prominence in the overall progression of the game.
All these different aspects are wrapped up in a smartphone-based interface that feels intuitive. However, it is by SunnySide ambition is also its downfall. Although I am grateful to have so many different activities, none of them feel fulfilling or worth engaging in. A big part of this comes from how poorly things work. The game is sometimes a challenge to play because it barely runs, especially in outdoor, open world areas. However, it even takes time to load and runs at a snail’s pace sometimes indoors. This could be because I spent most of my time on Steam Deck, where the frame rate is inconsistent. Worse still, the frequent spawns and slow loading times ruin it even more.
To give it a fair shake, I warmed 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. Without a doubt, this game has 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 factor that may never be overcome, and that is the emotional system. There is 25 romantic characters It sounds impressive, but this hides some serious problems with dating in the game. Each character has dating preferences on a scale of gender expression. This scale is what players use during character creation to determine their identity. Basically, you have a 10-point scale for masculine, a 10-point scale for feminine, and non-binary right in the middle. You can choose your gender identity anywhere on the spectrum, which is pretty neat. However, there are some problems with this system and mainly 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 my greatest joy with this game is talking and interacting with the characters. You can say SunnySideThe developer has noted from personality series. Each character has different levels of their friendship 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 just too bad there’s so much frustration with the controls, performance, and UI most of the time to get that little reward. Ultimately, this makes SunnySide typical of early access “wait and see” games. It simply does too much from survival mechanics to building, RPG combat, farming, and relationships.
While there’s a lot to see here, rarely does anything work properly to make the experience worthwhile. I believe there is a solid farming simulation RPG in the works SunnySide, but it may take time and many updates to reach that potential. Now, I wouldn’t recommend checking it out unless you’re okay with quite a few complaints.
SunnySide Now available on PC via Steam.
